


The End Must Be Unmeasured

by pineapplesquid



Series: In the Details [3]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Armageddon, Established Relationship, Human Crowley (Good Omens), M/M, Miscommunication, Protective Aziraphale (Good Omens), Protective Crowley (Good Omens), Wings, partially
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-11
Updated: 2020-02-14
Packaged: 2020-12-09 09:55:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 73,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20992886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pineapplesquid/pseuds/pineapplesquid
Summary: Crowley’s life is pretty good. He’s at the top of his career and poised to win the most prestigious award in his field, he loves his work, and he has a literally too-good-to-be-human  boyfriend who’s waiting when he gets home. The flaws—a current project that’s a design nightmare, his continual dissatisfaction with the layout of their master bath, and co-workers who just want to know why he and that lovely boyfriend of his aren’t getting married—should be just minor blips. Right? Except even he wouldn’t mind an answer to that last one himself.All Aziraphale wants is to know how to do this relationship thing properly, before he manages to mess things up for good. And to get his hands on that rare volume of Keats that slipped through his fingers some decades ago. Taking action, though, is always scarier than inaction.Of course, neither of them was anticipating Armageddon.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> “A great building must begin with the unmeasurable, must go through measurable means when it is being designed, and in the end must be unmeasured.” –Louis Kahn
> 
> Chapter count is somewhat approximate at the moment; I think about 8, but we'll see where it ends up.

“Crowley!” The voice calling his name was not a particularly welcome interruption. Crowley had been deep in blueprints for laying out the yoga studio, sauna, meditation space, and luxury locker rooms, all within the existing footprint of the building, and all maximizing the passive solar potential. At least the spa was in another wing. He was close, he could tell, and wouldn’t have welcomed having his concentration broken in any case.

The leader of the two figures rapidly coming down the hall towards him wasn’t one calculated to reconcile him to the distraction. She had a name, Crowley suspected. The only options that were coming to mind were Coleus and Celery. The uncontested best at the firm at floor layouts for offices, she always had plenty of work to do, but that didn’t seem to stop her from knowing everyone and everything. Apparently today she’d picked up the duty of showing the new guy around.

He looked appallingly young, even for one fresh out of school. His handshake was decidedly diffident, too, although Crowley could remember someone telling him that the new recruit was supposed to be particularly promising at landscapes. 

Celery was busily talking at him, waving vaguely at Crowley as she spoke. “–does a lot of our mixed-use projects. He has the best book collection, too,” she went on breezily. “The envy of the firm.”

The new recruit looked at his shelves, idly at first and then with closer interest as he took in some of the titles. His eyebrows rose, and he looked at Crowley with new interest. 

“I have a source,” Crowley drawled, watching lazily. He failed to add an invitation to drop by and borrow a book anytime.*

*Merely having the books on display was enough to inspire the appropriate amount of envy, he didn’t need to let anyone else actually _touch _them.

“His boyfriend,” Celery added blithely. “He owns a bookstore. Over in Soho.”

The new recruit brightened. “Wait, Fell’s?” he asked. “I’ve heard about them. They’re supposed to have one of the best collections anywhere.” 

Crowley allowed himself a smirk. Five years ago, few but the most dedicated book collectors had so much as heard of A.Z. Fell and Co. These days the shop’s fame had spread among a specific segment of the city; about half of the architects Crowley met anymore had either been to visit Fell’s or knew of it. None of them, however, had successfully purchased so much as a bookmark*, much less one of the highly prized volumes. Crowley, on the other hand, had a shelf-full.

*If only because Fell’s didn’t sell bookmarks. Or calendars, or mugs, or chocolate bars, or any of the other things commonly found nestled among the shelves of lesser establishments. Fell’s was a bookshop, and it sold _books**_.

**In theory, anyway. 

“He always comes to office parties and stuff, you’ll see him next week. He’s a total sweetheart, too. They’ve been together for what, four years?” Celery asked him.

“Five,” Crowley said. 

Celery frowned at him playfully. “You two going to get married any time soon, then? Trust me, you don’t want to let that one get away.”

Crowley didn’t flinch, or frown, or freeze. He shrugged lazily, the very picture of unconcern. “We’re not in any rush,” he said.

Celery shrugged herself, apparently giving up on him for now. “Anyway,” she told the new recruit, “Crowley’s working on the Babylonica project right now, so you probably won’t see much of him these days.”

The new recruit nodded politely as she ushered him out and over towards the next office. Crowley put the conversation firmly out of his head and turned back to his own work.

**

Crowley parked out front—officially it wasn’t a legal spot, but all the parking enforcement in the neighborhood knew the Bentley now, and after Aziraphale had had a quiet word with them there was no risk of a ticket—and strode into the bookshop, setting the bell jingling. “Aziraphale!” he called out as he stepped in. There was, rather unexpectedly, a customer who had persisted against today’s peculiarly musty smell to peruse some shelves. She wasn’t too near the architecture section, so Crowley left her alone, ignoring the look she gave him.

“Back here,” Aziraphale’s voice floated out from somewhere in the shelves. The customer jumped, apparently unaware that she hadn’t been alone in the shop. “I’ll be right out.”

Crowley leaned back against one of the tables that dotted the foyer. The patron made a brave effort, but after her fourth jumpy twitch round to look at him she gave up, leaving the shop as quickly as dignity allowed.

“Here I am,” Aziraphale said, emerging a minute or two later, coming straight over to Crowley and bracing himself on his chest for a kiss. “Oh,” he said, looking around. “I could have sworn that someone else had come in.”

Crowley shrugged. “Come on,” he said, wrapping an arm around Aziraphale’s shoulders. “Let me take you out to dinner.”

“Is it that time already?” Aziraphale said vaguely.

“It is,” Crowley said. “As you can tell by the fact that I’m home from work.” There was that, he thought, if one were inclined to focus on the bright side. Home was here, and so was Aziraphale.

“Where would you like to go, my dear?” Aziraphale asked. Crowley relaxed into the familiar rhythm of dinner negotiations—his role was to suggest options until Aziraphale heard one that appealed to him tonight—and tried to stop dwelling.

It didn’t work. He distracted himself repeatedly as they walked over a favorite Italian place, choosing some of the more amusing annoyances from his day to regale Aziraphale with, and listening to the his saga about a particular book that he was trying to track down. The details of how he’d let it slip through his fingers back in the 1870’s and the various times since that he’d come close to securing it carried them through being seated and perusing the familiar menus. A few leading questions, carefully designed to draw the angel out, kept the topic going until the appetizers arrived.

And yet, Crowley’s thoughts just kept circling. He watched as Aziraphale took the first taste of his food, eyes closed in perfect contentment.

“Crowley, you must try the calamari.”

“You get it every time, angel,” Crowley said, amused. “I’ve had it before.”

“Yes, but it’s particularly good tonight,” Aziraphale said, beaming. He speared a piece, carefully dragged it through the sauce, and held his fork out across the table.

Crowley, helpless to resist, leaned forward. He indulged himself by making a little bit of a show of it, putting his hand over Aziraphale’s to hold it steady while he accepted it, chewing slowly and making a noise of pleasure. Aziraphale’s cheeks flushed slightly, and he looked like he wanted to say something disapproving, but as he’d instigated, and Crowley had only accepted what was offered, it wasn’t like he could really complain. Crowley hid a smirk in his wine glass, took a deeper draught than he meant to, took an uncomfortable moment to consider the burst of feelings in his chest and how much he'd really rather keep feeling them forever, and stepped off the cliff.

“That Celery woman was hanging around today.” He fancied his voice was just as casual as the comment called for at face value. 

Aziraphale looked at him with a mild frown. “Your co-worker Cecily?”

Crowley flicked a hand dismissively. “Her.” 

Aziraphale smiled. “She’s always seemed like a lovely person. I have been glad that you have such nice co-workers.”

“Yes, yes, she’s a big fan of you too.” Crowley waited for Aziraphale’s pleased smile to wear itself out, and continued. “She asked me a question.”

“That is something that is occasionally done, in a conversation.” 

Crowley ignored him. “She asked if we were going to get married soon.”

Aziraphale froze, for just a moment, in exactly the way that Crowley hadn’t earlier. “Ah,” he said. “Did she, now.”

“I told her that we weren’t in any rush,” Crowley said. Aziraphale’s shoulders relaxed at that, and his own stomach knotted.

“No reason to be, really,” Aziraphale said calmly.

“Only,” Crowley said, and then didn’t know how to finish it. “I didn’t know if you’d ever. You know. Thought about it.”

“Being in a rush?” Aziraphale asked. Crowley raised his eyebrows and waited. If he’d learned anything in the past five years, it was how to tell when Aziraphale was being deliberately obtuse.

After a long moment Aziraphale broke his gaze, looking faintly abashed. “Marriage is—that is—” he sat back, visibly organizing his thoughts. “It’s a very human thing,” he said finally.

“Oh.” Crowley’s stomach felt cold. “So that’s a no, then.”

Aziraphale’s hands fluttered. “No, no,” he said, sounding worried. “No, that’s not what I meant. It’s just—” he paused again. “I was trying to let you set the pace, I suppose. I don’t really know how these things are done, I’m afraid.”

Crowley’s glasses slipped down his nose as he stared across the table. “Angel, if I’d been setting the pace you would have been mine very, very much sooner.”

Aziraphale’s eyes widened. “Really?” He looked a little ashamed as he absorbed this news. “I didn’t mean to keep you waiting, my dear.”

“You haven’t,” Crowley assured him, quickly. “Well. Not really.” 

“We’ve wasted some time, then, I suppose.” 

“Not wasted, angel,” Crowley said, stung by the very idea. “It’s not a _waste_, being with you.” Aziraphale’s expression was still sad and a little bit guilty, and he had to find the right words to lift it again. He resigned himself to honesty. “ 's not like I’ve been unhappy, you know. Living together, going out, whatever, we don’t need to be married to do any of that. Been perfectly happy this whole time, really.”

Aziraphale’s face had softened into a smile as he spoke, so at least that part of his plan had worked. “Oh, my dear,” he said, reaching across the table and patting Crowley’s hand. “Me too. Every day. Well.” He sat back, his voice becoming a little bit more business-like, although the soft smile remained. “That does settle that, then, I suppose.” 

Crowley forced himself to return the smile, trying to ignore the sinking pit in his stomach. It was the gentlest refusal he could have gotten. That should probably make it sting less, but somehow he couldn’t quite convince himself of the logic of that.

Aziraphale was looking at him now with concern, a little frown forming, and Crowley cast about desperately for something else to talk about. “This wine is rather good,” he said, although truthfully at the moment he wasn’t even registering the taste. “We should look for a bottle or two, maybe.”

Aziraphale hummed, still frowning at him, looking unconvinced. “Oh, and did I tell you?” Crowley asked, keeping his tone light with what felt like a herculean effort. “I found a bottle of that white that you liked so much. Was the last one they had, too, and I nearly had to fight a woman for it—” 

Aziraphale let him turn the subject, laughing at all the right moments and following it up with a story of one of the times (in the 1920’s, as far as Crowley could place it) that two of his customers had gotten into a fistfight in the street over a book that he had no intention of selling to either of them. Eventually he stopped darting little worried glances at him. 

It was fine. Crowley would get over it. Of course he would. He had almost everything he wanted, anyway, it would be foolish to regret the last missing piece. Nothing could ruin what he did have. He just wouldn’t let it.

**

Aziraphale was always more excited about work parties than Crowley was. He attributed it to the novelty—“I’ve been self-employed for 900 years, my dear, and nobody ever threw me a party!”—but Crowley was, at heart, convinced that it was a combination of the catering, which was usually rather good, and the chance for Aziraphale to snoop around a part of his life that he usually didn’t get to see. 

Even by his usual standards, though, he’d been particularly cheerful today. He’d been genuinely pleased about wearing the new cashmere jumper that Crowley had given him a few months ago instead of his usual coat, and he’d genuinely complimented Crowley’s own outfit choice. He listened attentively to Crowley’s rambling complaint about his current project—the client, a business woman who had read a magazine or two about architecture and now seemed to think she was an expert, who wanted half again as many features as was reasonable crammed into the existing footprint, and _could_they save what original features remained, and of course she really needed a Leeds certification of silver or higher—making appropriate noises of sympathy or disapprobation. 

“_Babylonica_,” Crowley was saying with disgust. “What kind of a name is that?”

Aziraphale frowned at him vaguely. “What sort of a business is it?”

“A ‘corporate wellness retreat’,” Crowley said, wringing every last drop of condescension from the words. “For the discerning executive team that wishes to rejuvenate their chakras or whatever. And she doesn’t even have the decency to live in London. I don’t _do _the country.” 

Aziraphale had just smiled at that, though, and said that a day in the countryside sounded rather lovely, and Crowley would have to bring him along on one of his site visits sometime soon. 

His good spirits persisted through their arrival at the hotel ballroom. They were, as usual, rather late*, and the room was already full of his colleagues, past and current clients, assorted others who the company wanted to impress, and all of the spouses or partners who couldn’t get out of coming or who, like Aziraphale, had an inexplicable fondness for such functions.

*Crowley had a tendency to be fashionably late. Aziraphale, who’d rarely felt a sense of urgency in his 6,000 year sojourn on Earth and didn’t see any reason to start now, had a tendency to be later. 

They were separated almost instantly, Aziraphale drifting towards the food as Crowley was buttonholed by a pair of engineers who just couldn’t wait to discuss work until Monday. He got of them eventually with a promise to look over their schematics sometime soon, but before he could even look for Aziraphale he’d been grabbed by someone else, and then someone after them. It was a good half hour later before he had a break to grab a drink and find a spot to lean against a high table and survey the party. Perhaps some food, he was thinking, and then do his duty of brown nosing the executive team, and then he could find Aziraphale and start convincing him that it was time to go home.

“I’m Anthony Crowley’s fiancé, actually,” he heard distinctly floating across the room. Crowley froze. Had he really just heard— 

He turned and ducked around someone to see who Aziraphale was talking to, and nearly groaned aloud. The new recruit, of course, who was looking perfectly delighted at the news. Aziraphale looked every bit as pleased as he did, eyes alight and a smile on his lips as he waved the hand that wasn’t holding his drink.

It wasn’t that it was bad news, Crowley thought, it was just that it was rather a surprise. 

It occurred to him belatedly that even if he had already been aware that they were, apparently, engaged, he wouldn’t have wanted it spread around the company right now. He started edging around people, trying frantically to think up the right spin for damage control; the new guy was friends with Celery, but maybe the right words would at least postpone the inevitable. He hadn’t gotten more than a few steps, though, when he heard the sound of his name, uttered in a voice he couldn’t pretend to ignore. He stopped and turned, arranging his features into at least tolerable friendliness at the sight of a face that definitely demanded it. 

“Crowley!” the approaching figure said jovially. “Glad to see you here.” 

He managed to scrape up some deference—if anyone here expected it, after all, it was probably the chair of the board of the most prestigious professional organization in the country—and offered a nod that suggested the motion of a bow. “Ms. Harrison. Enjoying the party?”

“Sarah, please,” the woman said. Somehow, without doing anything so overt as grabbing Crowley by the elbow, she’d managed to work them over toward the wall. “I’m glad I spotted you. Been watching your work for a while now—those plans for that Georgian flat I saw a few years ago, those were great, by the way. Not your usual sort of project, though.”

Crowley nodded. “I’m glad you liked them. The flat belonged to my—” Over Harrison’s shoulder he could still see Aziraphale and the new recruit, now joined by several more of his co-workers. If you couldn’t be ‘em, join ‘em, he supposed. “Fiancé,” he continued, almost smoothly. “Quite a unique property, really. It was really a pleasure to re-do it for us."

“Fiancé, eh? Congrats,” Harrison said pleasantly. It was impossible, Crowley realized, to tell if she was saying it with one e or two. “But of course it’s the Malus building that we’ve really been looking at.”

Crowley didn’t have to work as hard to dredge up a smile for that one. That project, which had occupied the majority of the last three years, was unquestionably the best work he’d ever done. “I hope you approve. I know it took a few risks—”

“A few?” Harrison laughed. “It was the biggest gamble I’ve seen in decades. But it paid off! We all agreed, there hasn’t been anything like it.”

Something about the way she stressed the word “we” caught Crowley’s subconscious, which sat up and started trying to tell him something. “Thanks,” he said again.

“I just wanted to go ahead and say congratulations, really. It’s well deserved—could hardly have considered anyone else this year, I think.” Harrison must have misinterpreted the look on Crowley’s face—Crowley himself couldn’t tell what it looked like, because it mostly felt numb—clapping him on the back and going on, “I know, I know, we’re not supposed to talk about it until it’s official, but a smart fellow like you, with your finger on the pulse and all, you’ll have seen it coming, I’m sure.”

“I, well.” Crowley’s brain was running entirely on autopilot now and apparently reaching some unholy fusion with Aziraphale. “One wouldn’t want to assume—”

Harrison laughed, loudly enough that conversations around them paused for a moment. “And modest, too,” she said. “That’s what we like to have. Well, I’ll be seeing you before the year’s out—the banquet’s in November.” She clapped him heavily on the shoulder again and made her way off, the crowd parting before her, before Crowley’s brain could manage to come up with a coherent response.

Well. That was a thing. He stood there for a long moment, trying to get his thoughts under some kind of control before giving up on it as a bad job. Alcohol. That was what he needed. Lots and lots of alcohol, except that this was still a work party, so that would have to wait for later. Another glass, though, could only help.

He managed to acquire that, at least, next turning his attention to the matter of finding Aziraphale. He’d nearly made it before being hailed again. 

“Crowley!” This time he would have ignored it, except that a hand landed on the arm that was holding his drink, and it would probably have spilled if he tugged away. “I’ve been looking for you,” Celery exclaimed, almost in his ear. “You’re a deep one, aren’t you!” 

Crowley merely raised his eyebrows and glanced down at her hand, which she promptly withdrew. A few more steps, and they were within a reasonable radius of Aziraphale. Crowley relaxed minutely, feeling rather less like a lone target.

“Not a word!” Celery was still talking. “You said you weren’t in a hurry, didn’t you, just last week, and now here I am hearing that it’s all settled?” 

“Something like that,” Crowley said shortly. 

Aziraphale apparently caught that, turning to catch sight of them. Even from across the room he’d already looked like he was enjoying himself, but now his smile truly lit. “Crowley!” he said, reaching out a hand, resting it gently on his back and guiding him closer. “You’ve found quite a few people to talk to.”

“So have you, angel,” Crowley said, flicking a glance around the group that Aziraphale had just abandoned. “Having a good time?”

Aziraphale’s smile was response enough. “Oh, Cecily!” he said, catching sight of her. “There you are. A pleasure to see you, my dear.”

“I hear congratulations are in order!” she chirped. Aziraphale beamed back at her with no sign of self-consciousness, and Crowley felt the last shreds of resentment evaporate. Towards the angel, anyway. “I was telling Crowley just the other day that he’d better get on it,” she was saying, and Crowley could still muster some annoyance at her. “And he said that the two of you weren’t in any hurry! And now look at you!” 

It was too good of an opportunity to make a little trouble, and Aziraphale did deserve it after all of this. “It was a surprise,” he said smoothly. “Couldn’t risk word getting out beforehand. You know how it is.”

“A surprise proposal!” Her voice was carrying, especially at this pitch of excitement, and it caught the attention of half of Aziraphale’s previous cluster, who turned and flocked to them, all looking eager. “Oh, that’s so romantic. What did you do?” 

Crowley froze, feeling more trapped than he had even with Harrison earlier. “I, er,” he managed. 

“Oh, he’s so modest, he won’t tell it right anyway,” Aziraphale stepped in, with a sly glance at Crowley out of the corner of his eye. It was the second time in five minutes that someone had called him modest, which was definitely a new record, and he would have considered taking offense except that he always enjoyed watching Aziraphale in the mood to stir up trouble. “He showed up with flowers, of course,” he was saying merrily, “Which I suppose should have tipped me off that he was up to something, but really I didn’t think that much of it. . .” 

Crowley let his thoughts drift back to the conversation with Harrison as Aziraphale spun some story about picnicking in a rose garden or some such. He wanted to pretend that there was some ambiguity, but in all honesty it had been clear enough; not much of a way he could have misinterpreted it. It was good news, of course, an opportunity that many of his peers would have fought for—

And not one that he’d seen coming his way.

Aziraphale’s story had managed to wind through several diversions up to dining at the Ritz or something similar—Crowley would have been worried about Aziraphale’s assessment of his taste, but the little gathering was clearly eating it up, and Aziraphale was obviously doing it on purpose—and had finally gotten to the proposal itself, complete with a ring hidden in a secret compartment carved out of a copy of his favorite book.* 

*He’d read about this practice once in one of his rare forays online. At the time Crowley had been treated to a forty minute disquisition on the moral turpitude of marrying someone who’d perform such an act of desecration, but apparently it had stuck in the angel’s brain as Something Humans Find Romantic.

“Ooooh,” Celery said, then squinted at Aziraphale’s hand. “But where is it?”

Aziraphale stared at her and then down at his bare hand, clearly panicking. “Well, that is—”

“At the jewelers,” Crowley said lazily. “Needed resizing.” 

Aziraphale smiled up at him and picked up the thread. “He did try,” he said, with a confidential air. “But he sized it off this one.” He waved his right pinky, the gold ring on it catching the light. “And of course that wasn’t the right size for my ring finger.” He glanced up at Crowley, mischief in his eyes. “It was very sweet of you to try, though, darling.” 

Crowley raised an eyebrow back at him. His reputation was possibly never going to recover from this, but Aziraphale was so clearly enjoying himself that he wouldn’t have put a stop to it even if he could have.

“What does it look like?” another co-worker was asking eagerly. “Did you get a diamond? Is it fair trade?”

Aziraphale’s imagination clearly let him down again, his eyes widening helplessly as he looked up at Crowley. “It’s wood,” Crowley said, with a dim recollection of something a college friend had gone on about when he got engaged. “Just for the engagement, you know. It gets worn, but then you’re ready to swap it out for the wedding band.”

One of the listeners actually sighed, stars in her eyes. The new recruit, though, was listening with a faint frown. “But how can you resize wood?” he asked.

“Your glass is empty, angel,” Crowley said loudly, taking it out of Aziraphale’s hand and glancing around the group. “Anyone else need a refill?”

**

“So,” Crowley said as they finally settled down on their own sofa where he could sprawl against Aziraphale’s side, two glasses of wine on the table in front of them. “Fiancé, huh?”

Aziraphale looked at him in sudden worry. “I’m sorry, my dear, did you not want me to mention it? I didn’t even think to ask, did I. I am sorry—”

“No, no, it’s not that,” Crowley said. “I just didn’t know we were engaged.”

Aziraphale startled. “Not engaged?” he asked, voice creeping up. “I—we—you didn’t—oh dear,” he said, gaze now darting around the room. “I thought you wanted—but—oh, and I went and told all your coworkers, and now they’ll all think—”

“Angel,” Crowley said loudly. Aziraphale broke off, looking slightly wildly down at him. “I do want,” he said clearly. “I’m not upset. I just didn’t know.”

Aziraphale frowned, not looking any less like he was about to vibrate out of his own skin. “You were the one who brought it up!”

“Yeah, I know, I did, but—” Crowley’s words almost deserted him, but he managed to scrounge a few. “It’s not like you actually asked.”

“You said that you’d been happy this whole time, and I said that then it was all settled.” Aziraphale had the inward look that he got when trying to remember something, and Crowley was sure that he could have recounted their conversation verbatim. "And then you started talking about wine."

“I thought that you meant the way things were,” he said. “That if we were both happy already it hardly mattered whether we got married, so why worry about it.” 

Aziraphale stared at him. “That’s reading a great deal into a very few words,” he said tartly. Crowley squirmed his way further down on the sofa, resting his head against Aziraphale’s shoulder so that he didn’t have to look at him. “And it’s not like you asked me either.”

“I brought it up in the first place,” Crowley protested. “I did my bit, said it sounded nice, I don’t know what else you think I was supposed—”

“Crowley.” Aziraphale’s voice was soft but insistent. “Dearest, come on, look at me.” Crowley grumbled but moved, leaning back far enough that he could see Aziraphale’s eyes again. “Crowley, my love, would you do me the very great honor of marrying me?”

Crowley groaned. “Trust you to sound like a Dickens character right now,” he muttered.

“It would make me exceedingly happy. Do agree and make me the luckiest of men.” There was a gentle layer of teasing on top, but underneath was a solid core of sincerity that washed Crowley with warmth.

He smiled, helpless not to. “Yes,” he said. “Yeah, sure. Let’s get married.”

Aziraphale beamed, bending down to kiss him. By the time they came up for air he was looking decidedly more rumpled, hair sticking up in all directions and his bowtie undone. It suited him.

“Wasn’t exactly how I pictured finding out,” Crowley said. 

Aziraphale flinched and gave him an apologetic look. “I should have asked, I suppose, but just as we got there I realized that I could call myself your fiancé, and I was a bit too excited to stop and think about it.”

“It’s fine, angel,” Crowley reassured him. “They would have found out anyway. I just didn’t want to deal with Celery.”

Aziraphale shook his head reprovingly. “You really need to be nicer about her. She’s a very sweet woman who cares about you.”

“I do not,” Crowley protested reflexively. “We had better go ahead and get you a ring, though, I suppose.”

Aziraphale giggled. “It had better be wood. I don’t know how you come up with these things under pressure, my dear, I really don’t. I had absolutely no idea what to say until you came to my rescue. I was very impressed.” 

Crowley looked up at him, eyebrows raised in speculation. “And just how impressive—”

Aziraphale interrupted him, leaning down to kiss him again. “I could just keep telling you,” he murmured as they broke apart.

“You were the one who came up with the most elaborate proposal I’ve ever heard of off the top of your head,” Crowley said. “Speaking of, angel, why _did y_ou have that all lined up and ready to go? You seemed awfully surprised when I first brought it up, for someone who’s been planning that long. . . “

Aziraphale looked deeply offended. “I certainly wouldn’t have wanted such a vulgar display, let alone perpetrated it,” he sniffed. “Public proposals, really. And if you brought me flowers I’d think that something was very wrong.”

“I bring you flowers!” Crowley said, affronted. After a moment’s thought he had to amend the statement. “I could bring you flowers.”

“You’ve never once done such a foolish thing,” Aziraphale said. “There are plenty of flowers up in the garden, all of them nicer than what you could get at the shops. And you have no eye for them once they’re picked, my dear, and you know it’s much better to leave such things to me. If you wanted give me a gift, you’d—”

“I’d bring you chocolates, if I wanted to bring you anything,” Crowley muttered.

“—bring me something I actually wanted, like chocolates,” Aziraphale finished serenely. “And I should hope that you’d know better than to mutilate an innocent book just to—”

“Yes, yes,” Crowley interrupted hastily. “We all know how you feel about using books for anything except reading, and we were both very clever tonight.”

This, Crowley was pleased to see, had the desired effect of derailing Aziraphale’s nascent rant. He smiled down at Crowley instead with that expression that exuded innocence and, in actuality, promised anything but. “I suppose I ought to show my appreciation,” he said, eyes locked on Crowley’s lips.

“I wasn’t the only one who was clever.” Crowley smirked, waiting for Aziraphale’s eyes to wander back up to his. “If we’re interested in being fair.”

“I shouldn’t object if you were to return the favor, my dear,” Aziraphale murmured, and that was the last of the conversation for some time.


	2. Chapter 2

Being engaged was not, somewhat to Crowley’s surprise, substantially different from living together in sin.* There had been a rather funny moment when he’d mentioned to a shop assistant that he was just waiting for his fiancé and then watched her evident confusion when Aziraphale joined him—an advantage that he hadn’t considered, after years of “boyfriend” or “partner”, either of which were usually interpreted the right way. And there was a new tendency for the most random of people to ask, following the original congratulations, what their wedding colors were going to be. The entire endeavor, Crowley felt, would be worth it merely for the expression on Aziraphale’s face when confronted with the vagaries of the modern industrial wedding complex.

*One time when things had been rather too quiet for a while, Crowley had used this phrase in Aziraphale’s hearing. He was somewhat surprised at the resulting laughter, which lasted for several minutes before he was informed, rather smugly, that as Heaven considered all of Earth to be a den of potential iniquity, “living in sin” was hardly a new development for the angel.

One of the few pieces of advice that Crowley had heard that he thought was worth following was that wedding planning should wait, and he placed a total ban on it for the first week and a half of their engagement, announcing that they were just going to enjoy themselves. Aside from Aziraphale rapidly decreeing that there were not, under any circumstances, going to be designated wedding colors, the rule had been respected.

It couldn’t last forever, of course, and about ten days later, on the afternoon that they went to a jeweler to pick up Aziraphale’s ring, he relented. It was warm for early spring, the late afternoon sun pleasant on their backs, and by silent agreement they’d taken the longer way home, winding through the park as they went. A photoshoot of a happy couple in a pair of big white dresses had caught Crowley’s eye, and glancing over he saw that Aziraphale had noticed them too.

“Would you want that?” Crowley asked, without thinking. 

Aziraphale looked at him sideways. “Which? The dress? The photoshoot? Neither of them are really quite my speed, my dear.”

Crowley made a face at him. “The whole—” he made a broad gesture. “Wedding thing. You know. I mean, we could just go to city hall, if you didn’t.”

Aziraphale gave a non-committal hum. “What were you thinking, my dear?”

Crowley thought about it as they walked a few more meters, putting the happy couple behind them. This was Aziraphale, after all, who’d spent six millennia watching humans, loving them even (maybe especially) in their most ridiculous of moments. Always watching from the outside. How many weddings had he seen, never even imagining that one of them could be his? 

Not this time. “A wedding could be nice,” he said casually.

“Make our promises in front of everyone,” Aziraphale said, watching him with small smile.

Crowley wasn’t so sure that he was wild about that bit, but Aziraphale looked so happy. “Not in a church, though.” 

“Certainly, my dear, if that’s what you would like.”

And that easily, it was settled. A wedding. Perhaps in the spring, Aziraphale said, although certainly fall could be quite lovely too.

Crowley still hadn’t told Aziraphale about the conversation with Harrison. There were enough complications at the moment, he told himself. There would be time enough to worry about that one later.

**

And then, later was now. 

They’d cooked in, for once, Crowley making one of the few dishes that he knew. Aziraphale had given him the same amazed look that he always did when Crowley produced something edible, as if he was the true miracle-worker in the house. He let himself puff up a bit under it, chopping vegetables with a flourish that nearly ended up including the tip of his finger. 

As he did every time, Crowley decided as they sat down that they should do this more often. Going out was all very well, and often necessary with the hours he tended to keep, but there was something about sitting at their table with Aziraphale across from him. The dining room, being the result of some of the most extensive renovations they’d done, was one of the more modern rooms in the flat; it had the same tall windows as the rest of the rooms, but only a minimal amount of fancy plasterwork, and none of the guilding that Aziraphale had somehow talked Crowley into keeping in a couple of the other rooms.

Aziraphale, it had turned out, held what had originally appeared to be a complex and arcane set of preferences for the color in decorating. Crowley was able to fairly rapidly distill them down to their essentials, though: light colors but not white, with an occasional jewel tone unpredictably thrown in. Most of the flat had followed these precepts, but here Crowley had decreed an exception and painted the walls in a rich navy. He considered it an unadulterated success. Whenever Aziraphale sat down at the table the color set him off perfectly, his pale clothes and hair practically glowing against it.

They’d been discussing wedding planning in desultory way as he cooked; Crowley had found a local hall that had a license for civil weddings and rather nice garden out back and was trying to convince Aziraphale that they should visit, while the angel was trying to list, out loud, everyone he thought should make the guest list and interrupting himself to ask Crowley if he knew what Pinterest was, since it seemed to be _de rigueur _for weddings these days.

By the time they’d sat down to eat Aziraphale had set the wedding aside, and had been gently musing about honeymoons for a few minutes. He was considering the merits and practicality of an extended trip—so that we could really take the time to spend together, darling—and abruptly Crowley couldn’t take it anymore.

“Look, angel.” Aziraphale didn’t look put out to be interrupted, but just looked across at him inquiringly. “Something’s come up.” 

The inquiring look slid into neutrality. It was a rare expression on Aziraphale’s face, and not one that boded well. Crowley couldn’t tell what he was thinking right now. “Yes?” he asked, his tone not offering any additional clues. 

It had been a mistake to start this conversation. “It’s not bad news,” Crowley said quickly. “It’s good news, really. As much as it’s news at all, which I’m still not really sure that—”

“Crowley,” Aziraphale said, a sharp edge to his voice. “Would you just tell me what’s going on? I promise you, I can handle it.”

“I had a conversation with Sarah Harrison.” Crowley found he wasn’t above leaving out when, exactly, this conversation had happened. “The chair of the Institute. She said—well, she didn’t quite say it, but—” Aziraphale was looking less tense, at least, but no more patient, and Crowley forced himself to say it plainly. “Pretty sure I’m winning their award this year.”

Aziraphale brightened at that, surprised and happy. “Oh! But that is good news, my dear. Whyever did you make such a meal out of telling me? I did notice the last time I was at your office that there’s a bit of an empty spot on your shelf—another award should fill it out nicely. And of course you deserve it.” He looked inquiring. “What are you getting it for?” 

“It’s a little more complicated than that,” Crowley said, reluctant to spoil the moment, but knowing that he couldn’t put it off again. “It comes with more than a plaque.”

“Money?” Aziraphale asked. “But why would that have you all tied up in knots?”

“A fellowship.” Crowley caught Aziraphale’s gaze and held it. “It comes with a fellowship. To study and work internationally. For two years.”

Aziraphale stared at him silently, all the wind knocked out of his congratulations. “Ah,” he managed eventually, and then, “Where?” 

“Where?” Crowley repeated stupidly. 

“Where will you be going?” The question was sharp.

“It’s not set yet, it won’t be announced until—” Aziraphale looked back up at him, blue eyes stormy, and the truth spilled out. “Rumor mill says it’s supposed to be Tokyo, this year.”

The breath came out of the angel all at once. “Tokyo.”

“I—it’s not like I have to go, they can’t make me, but. . .” Crowley let some of his feelings leak into his face, trying to show what all of this meant to him. Aziraphale’s lips tightened, and he looked away. “It’s a big honor, and such an opportunity. . .”

“Of course,” Aziraphale said quietly. 

“Harrison didn’t tell me any of the details—she couldn’t, it’s not supposed to be out yet, and there were too many people—I don’t know anything for sure yet.” 

Something in that caught Aziraphale’s attention. “And when, exactly, was this conversation?” 

Hell. He wasn’t going to lie, though, not to Aziraphale’s face. “At the party.”

“Last week.” Aziraphale’s voice had gone expressionless again.

“Yeah.” The admission left a hollow spot in his chest.

“I see.” There was an aching pause, and then Aziraphale picked up his fork again, to all appearances perfectly calm, and turned his attention back to his food. He finished his plate, eating each bite carefully and precisely, but any pretense of enjoyment had gone.

The rest of the evening wasn’t perfectly silent; Aziraphale liked to put on a record while he did the dishes, for one thing. And he did speak to Crowley; short phrases, asking him to bring the pots over to the counter or to move when he needed to reach a specific cabinet. The matter on both of their minds was only mentioned once—at the end of the washing-up, when Aziraphale, attention still apparently fixed on the last plate he was drying, said in a brittle voice, “Do let me know whatever you decide, my dear.”

It had not been a promising end to the evening.

Things thawed a little bit over the next two days. By the next morning Aziraphale was at least addressing more than just the minimum necessary remarks to Crowley. He had, however, managed to find several urgent projects in the bookstore that occupied his time well into the evening, and the one time that Crowley had tried to bring up something related to wedding planning he’d made up a clearly transparent excuse and hurriedly left the room. Crowley let his own hours start stretching into the evening, and didn’t allow his thoughts to drift away from his work. 

By Friday Crowley was exhausted, both desperately ready for the week to be over and dreading two entire days at home. In desperation he internally resolved that they would, somehow, manage to hash it all out sometime over the weekend. This couldn’t just go on.

By lunchtime his attention was flagging badly, and he was less irritated than he would normally have been when a colleague came to fetch him for a last-minute meeting. If it finished out the afternoon then he’d still have a chance to figure out somewhere suitably nice to take Aziraphale that evening and try to figure out how to patch it all up.

He was distracted debating the merits of one of their favorite cozy spots in Soho compared something that would make a splash (had Aziraphale’s mention of the Ritz in his proposal story been a hint? Was there any hope of an open reservation any time in the next month?) that he wasn’t paying much attention to his surroundings as he followed Brenda down the familiar hallway to the conference room.

He was completely taken by surprise, therefore, when they opened the door and a roar of cheerful noise greeted them. He stopped in his tracks, eyes taking in the streamers that had bene used to hastily decorate the room, the food covering the table and the crowd of smiling coworkers. And there, off to one side, chatting with one of the receptionists, was _Aziraphale_, of all people. 

“Surprise!” Celery popped up at his elbow, startling him all over again.

The noise of the gathering had, hopefully, covered the involuntary noise that he made at her sudden appearance. “Mmm?”

“Happy engagement!” she chirped. “Everyone’s so happy for the two of you, we just had to have a little celebration, of course.”

“Of course.” He didn’t particularly try to mask the sarcasm in his voice, but it never seemed to register with her anyway.

“There’s the food, and we can cut the cake in a bit. Oh, and Lionel says you’re officially off for the afternoon, so go ahead and have a drink!” She smiled at him, clearly sincere, and despite how badly he didn’t want to be here right now, it was hard to hold too much of a grudge. 

The promised drink helped, of course. His coworkers were variously enthusiastic, apathetic, cynical and awkward about his engagement, but most of them actually seemed to be making an effort to be pleasant, and he only got drawn into a few technical discussions. It turned out, when one colleague got him onto the subject, that Crowley held highly specific and unexpected opinions on the subject of centerpieces, which he tucked away for later thought.

He had been chatting with his boss, having managed to intercept him on route to the corner where Aziraphale was stationed. Crowley was pretty sure that Lionel had never made the connection between his boyfriend and the bookshop owner whose property their one-time clients had tried to steal, but Aziraphale had definitely maintained the grudge, and Crowley made it a personal point to try to keep them apart. Eventually, though, Lionel had said something about a conference call with the States and made his way off, leaving Crowley to a much needed moment to gather himself. 

The room had quieted a bit and he caught Aziraphale’s voice chatting with one of the structural engineers, who had just asked him about wedding plans. “I really can’t say,” he could hear Aziraphale reply. “Everything’s rather up in the air right now, so it’s hard to count on much.” Crowley could hear the brittle edge to his voice; he just hoped he was the only one. He turned, watching, and saw Aziraphale notice him in return. 

“I’m sure we’ll figure it out, though,” he went on, and his voice was warmer now, and slightly louder, pitched to carry. “We always do. And it’s always worth it, of course, no matter how much of a headache it can be at the time.”

Someone else came up to talk to Crowley, then, and he barely caught the structural engineer starting to offer advice on choosing seasonal flowers. For the first time in two days, though, he felt like he could breathe properly. 

Later on, as the party had begun to wind down, he found himself and Aziraphale standing together, nobody paying them much attention for once. “Angel,” he said, and Aziraphale turned from where he’d been watching the rest of the guests. “I am sorry.”

His face softened all at once, and Crowley was selfishly glad that he was turned towards him and away from the rest of the room. That expression wasn’t for any of them to see. “I know, my dear,” he said quietly. He stepped closer, his arm pressing against Crowley’s, the most physical affection he tended to show in public, warm and close.

“It doesn’t have to change anything—” Crowley started.

“Don’t,” Aziraphale said, holding up a hand. “Let’s not, dearest. Just—it’ll keep, won’t it? There’s no need to sort anything out yet.”

“But—” That wouldn’t settle anything. It wasn’t like this was just going to go away—nor, honestly, did Crowley want it to. If he’d truly wanted to turn down the fellowship there wouldn’t have been a problem in the first place, after all. But Aziraphale was looking at him with a hopeful expression that he’d _missed _over the past two days, and he wasn’t strong enough to go back to the silence. “Yeah. Sure. If you want, angel.” 

Aziraphale smiled at him, and for now Crowley couldn’t regret capitulating. “Another slice of cake, then, perhaps,” he said cheerfully. “And we had better thank Cecily. She organized all this, you know, my dear.”

Crowley, who had suspected as much, just made a face. He was perfectly civil as they made their goodbyes, though, and even got in a word of thanks himself. Aziraphale proffered his arm as they walked to the car, and complained mildly about his driving the entire way home, and it all felt almost close enough to fine.

**

Crowley was sprawled across the loveseat that was tucked behind the shelves near the back room when the door opened. It was a favorite spot of his, particularly on mornings when the sun fell in wide stripes across it, only a little dimmed by the dusty window. He and Aziraphale had spent a great deal of time there early on, before there’d been a whole flat upstairs. The flat was nice enough—more than nice, really—but on mornings like this, when Aziraphale felt like puttering around the shop or working in the back room, Crowley often found himself here. After the past week, it was particularly nice to lie there thinking of nothing much and listening to the quiet noises of Aziraphale sorting out a mixed lot he’d picked up at an auction a few days ago. 

The noise of the door opened startled him out of his encroaching doze; he hadn’t realized that Aziraphale had opened the shop. He’d thought they were going to have a quiet morning in. Heavy footsteps crossed the floor, paused briefly in the middle of the atrium, and then, when no sign of life appeared, headed directly for the back room. Crowley caught sight of the man as he rounded the shelves; a head of dark, annoyingly perfect hair atop broad shoulders covered in a well-tailored grey jacket.

Crowley was seized by an instant and implacable dislike. It wasn’t even the annoyingly polished outfit or the incredible blandness of that precise shade of grey. It was, at least in part, the way the guy walked across the bookstore like he had an absolute right to it. Even Aziraphale didn’t seem so entitled to the space, and he owned it. 

The man paused outside the back room. There was no sign that he had even noticed Crowley’s presence on the sofa. “Is anyone around?” he asked loudly. “I had a question about—”

There was a loud thump from the office. It was distinctly similar to the sound of Aziraphale dropping a heavy book abruptly on his desk. “One moment,” his voice said, and apparently that was all the invitation the fellow thought he needed, as he walked confidently into the room and out of Crowley’s sight.

“Aziraphale,” the man said, still in his booming voice. “It’s been a while.” 

“Gabriel,” Aziraphale said stiffly and Crowley sat up, suddenly alert. Gabriel. Aziraphale’s old boss. The one who’d said he wasn’t good at his job, if Crowley was remembering correctly. Also an Archangel, but that didn’t seem like the most important thing right now. Crowley straightened and swung his legs down to the floor. Should he interrupt?

“What brings you here?” Aziraphale was asking.

“I’ve got tidings of, well, pretty big news,” Gabriel said. Crowley felt that this perhaps lacked the gravitas of the official version, although he couldn’t recall exactly how it was supposed to go. “Hope you’ve been enjoying your vacation down here. We’re going to need you back at work.”

“Vacation?” Aziraphale said, sounding confused. “This wasn’t temporary, Gabriel. We both made our choices—”

“Yeah, sure,” Gabriel interrupted him. Crowley made up his mind, standing and sauntering towards the back room. Gabriel had his back to the rest of the shop, and had trapped Aziraphale up against his desk. He was wringing his hands, his face wearing a nervous smile that Crowley had never seen before. His eyes widened when he saw Crowley and he jerked his chin, clearly trying to tell him to leave. “We’re going to need you reporting for duty with your regiment, though,” Gabriel was saying.

“My—what?” Aziraphale asked, clearly bewildered. He shot a harder glare at Crowley, who ignored it. Instead he leaned casually against a shelf and cleared his throat as Gabriel spoke again.

“Reporting for—” Gabriel interrupted himself at the noise, turning slowly to look Crowley up and down. “Um. Who is this?” he asked Aziraphale.

“This is Crowley,” Aziraphale said, still sounding stilted, but also pleased. “My fiancé.”

“Pleasure,” Crowley said, not extending his hand.

Gabriel ignored him completely, turning back to Aziraphale with an incredulous expression. “He’s human.”

“Yes.” 

Gabriel made a complicated face. “You’re getting married to a human.” 

“Yes,” Aziraphale repeated, sounding testy now.

“You do realize he’s mortal, right?” There was clear distaste in Gabriel’s voice.

“Oi,” Crowley said, but neither of them was paying him any attention.

“Only his body,” Aziraphale said. It was clearly something he’d thought about before. “His soul is as eternal as you or I.”

For a long moment, Crowley couldn’t remember how to breathe. Gabriel was staring at Aziraphale, clearly just as astonished. Then he began to laugh. Aziraphale flinched but recovered, standing steady in the face of his mirth. “You seriously think that will happen? You’re going to what, find him afterwards? Live happily ever after? With a _human soul_?”

“Something like that,” Aziraphale said with a kind of quiet dignity.

“You have no way of knowing that he’ll even end up in the right place.”

Aziraphale’s eyes were determined. “Then I suppose I just have faith.”

Gabriel gaped at him. Crowley tried not to do the same. “This is not my concern,” he said finally.

Aziraphale didn’t roll his eyes, but Crowley could tell that he wanted to. “Really, though, Gabriel, why are you here?” he asked. “It’s been quite a while since I’ve heard from any of you.”

“Things,” Gabriel said self-importantly, “Are afoot.”

“Are they?” Aziraphale asked disinterestedly. “And what things are those?”

“It’s the big one,” Gabriel said, clearly annoyed to be going off-script. “You know.”

“I really don’t.” 

“The big one,” Gabriel repeated. “Seas boiling. Stars falling. The four horsemen riding.” Aziraphale had blanched almost white, and Crowley felt a knot in his own stomach. “The Antichrist is on earth. Armageddon is at hand. In just about—” he checked his large gold watch. “Three months now.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had to do annoying medical stuff all morning and promised myself that I'd post this chapter after so that I'd have something to look forward to, even if it's a little bit shorter than most of the rest are probably going to be. 
> 
> Hate to say it but future updates are probably going to take rather longer, work is keeping me busy these days and sadly I don't usually get long weekends like this one.


	3. Chapter 3

For a long moment after Aziraphale saw Gabriel out the door, throwing the bolt across as if it would be enough to stop an Archangel if he decided to come back, silence reigned in the bookshop. Crowley watched Aziraphale steadily, and Aziraphale looked everywhere but back at Crowley.

Gabriel hadn’t stayed long after dropping his bombshell. He’d made a few more references to Aziraphale reporting for duty, but Crowley hadn’t been able to tell if he actually expected him to do that or if it were all an excuse to show up and gloat. It was hard to tell from Aziraphale’s behavior, which had been distinctly odd. He’d gone somehow both twitchy and deeply suppressed: his hands worked furiously, but only when they were out of Gabriel’s line of sight, he hadn’t met anyone’s eyes for more than a moment, and his tone had alternated between overtly nervous, vaugely appeasing, and an attempt at impassive. Crowley had seen many of those pieces over the last five years, but never in that combination, and it made it hard to tell what Aziraphale was thinking. 

“Aziraphale—” Crowley started.

“It’s about lunch time, isn’t it.” Aziraphale spoke over him, voice artificially bright. “What would you think about going to that new place on the corner?”

“Angel,” Crowley tried again.

“I know that fusion isn’t always your thing, but the other day Katie said that it was quite good, and I think it would be worth trying.”

A certain stubborn stiffness had settled into his shoulders. This, Crowley recognized. Aziraphale in full denial mode could be implacable. There’d be no point in pushing the issue right now. “Sure,” he capitulated. What was he going to say, anyway? _So, about the end of the world. . ._

Neither of them was paying much attention as they walked to the restaurant, and Crowley thought absently that only sheer luck kept both of them out from under passing cars, and only the deep familiarity that came with decades of residence that kept Aziraphale from steering them in entirely the wrong direction.

Once they got the restaurant and were seated at their table—tucked into a corner, which Crowley always appreciated, not that the restaurant was crowded at the moment—Aziraphale seemed to recall himself. He spent the next fifteen minutes musing out loud about almost every item on the menu, and then, after the waiter had taken it away, recounting neighborhood gossip that had been too trivial to pass on at the time.

Crowley could not possibly tolerate another minute of a description of someone’s niece’s godforsaken baby shower. Aziraphale had to see that this couldn’t go on all evening. He cleared his throat quietly and the angel stuttered to a halt, a skittish look in his eyes. Yeah, he knew.

“So, when you said forever,” Crowley started, not sure how to have this conversation, nor if this was really the place to have it. The prospect of the imminent Armageddon should probably be more important—for one thing, “forever” might not be a very relevant concept anymore—but it was the earlier part of the conversation that was weighing on his mind. “You meant. . .”

Aziraphale looked back at him across the table. Most of the time, he came across as completely human; a slightly fussy, middle-aged gay Englishman who looked every inch a bookseller. There were the occasional moments, though, when he wore every one of his six thousand-plus years. It should have terrified Crowley when it happened, and it did, but it was so much more than that—it left him feeling like he was floating in an impossibly deep sea, far, far greater than he could ever comprehend. And then Aziraphale would look at him, and he would see the love in his eyes, and be swept away again by the thought that of all the humans who had ever lived, he was the one who got to sit here, across from his angel, drinking tea. 

“I would hardly offer to make wedding vows if I didn’t intend to love you forever,” Aziraphale said, a hint of steel in his voice. 

Crowley still wasn’t sure what he wanted to say. “Usually those sorts of things are just, you know, till death do us part.”

Aziraphale inhaled sharply. This, this was one of the things that they’d never talked about, although they both knew that it was true. Crowley had known from the beginning that Aziraphale had existed long before he was born, and would exist long after his death; he’d just assumed that the topic would be too painful to discuss. His own imagination, after all, had always flinched away from picturing Aziraphale after he was gone. 

He’d thought that the angel was just going to make his way through the grief and go on. He’d never thought, had never known—

He’d never guessed that Aziraphale was making _plans_. Never really thought about the word _eternity_. Not as it applied to him.

It took Crowley’s breath away all over again. Aziraphale was ahead of him, even in this. “Tell me,” he said, quietly. 

“I don’t,” Aziraphale started, hesitantly. “I don’t really have a plan. What I said to Gabriel, that’s all that there is. I don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s all, well, rather ineffable. I don’t even know exactly what happens to human souls. It wasn’t my department, you know,” he added with a hint of a smile.

“And like Gabriel said, no telling where I’ll end up anyway,” Crowley said, trying for light-hearted. 

“That one, I’m fairly certain of,” Aziraphale said calmly. “Still. I don’t know what’s going to happen. But I love you,” he said, with all the certainty of eternity. “And that is never wrong. And I—I do have faith. In Her, and in us. I believe that you will not be taken from me.”

His eyes were shining with unshed tears as he looked at Crowley. How had he ever come to inspire such a look in anyone, much less someone like Aziraphale? A phrase about houses built on foundations of sand, learned sometime in childhood and almost forgotten, drifted across his mind, but he silenced it. If Aziraphale was going to build his faith on Crowley, then he would be bedrock. 

“You needn’t worry about it,” Aziraphale was saying, and the promise in his voice was a kind of bedrock of its own. “Not now. Not ever. I’ll take care of it, my dear, whenever—whenever I need to. Don’t let it be your burden to bear.” 

Crowley’s chest felt like it was bursting. He laid his right hand out flat on the table, and, as he’d hoped, Aziraphale rested his own on it. The dark wood ring stood out against his finger, and Crowley stroked this thumb against it. “I trust you, angel,” he said.

Aziraphale’s smile at that was heartstopping. He left his hand in Crowley’s as he returned to his meal, eating with every appearance of enjoyment. They finished lunch, coffee and dessert without any more mentions of serious topics, and walked back to the bookshop still discussing how Aziraphale thought he might be able to adopt some of the precepts of hostile architecture to the interior of the bookshop, where they might actually be able to do some good. Crowley was speaking passionately and vehemently against the idea of putting spikes on all the chairs, Aziraphale laughing almost too hard to protest that that was hardly what he’d meant by it. “More subtle than that,” he was insisting as they reached the door of the bookshop. He withdrew his arm from Crowley’s and stood there, patting pointlessly at his pockets in a mild pretense of searching for his keys as Crowley fished out his own set and unlocked the door for them.

Once they’d made their way upstairs Aziraphale hung his coat carefully in the closet, while Crowley dropped his over the arm of the sofa and dropped down next to it. Aziraphale, predictably, bustled off to the kitchen. Crowley could just hear the sounds of him filling the kettle and plugging it in, and the cabinets opening and closing as he pulled out mugs and tea. Of his own accord Crowley would have gone for another glass of wine instead, especially after a day like this one. Aziraphale, though, worried gently but relentlessly about the effects of frequent drinking on Crowley’s inconveniently human body, and had persisted in attempting to wrench them into a habit of a postprandial cup of tea instead. Some days Crowley followed him into the kitchen and poured his own preferred drink for himself, but today the short distance down the hallway suddenly seemed much too far to bother and he stayed sprawled on the sofa. There was something appealing about the familiar ritual, anyway.

It wasn’t many minutes before the inevitable mug appeared, set carefully on a coaster on the table in front of Crowley’s. More surprisingly, though, Aziraphale’s own favorite mug joined it on the table, rather than being carefully cradeled in his hands as it cooled.

And then the angel was there too—not settling down at the other end of the couch with a book, but kneeling next to him, and then over him. He pushed Crowley gently but inexorably down onto the sofa, coming to settle on top of him. The weight of his body was reassuring, and Crowley folded him close and nestled his face into the top of his head, enjoying the feel of his soft curls against his cheek.

Aziraphale had other plans, though. Before long his hands stole between them, opening Crowley’s clothing with sure, practiced movements. His own he removed more quickly, tossing them aside with uncharacteristic carelessness, all the while stealing kiss after kiss.

Crowley was getting swept away under his relentless attention, but details kept catching his attention. Lips that pressed too hard, almost desperate. Hands clinging a little too tightly for a little too long. Hips moving with more urgency than lingering pleasure.

_He’s scared_, Crowley realized. The measured words and calm expressions of earlier had been pure bravado, covering up a deep terror. _He thinks the world’s going to end, and he’s afraid_. 

Gently grabbing an elbow and a shoulder, Crowley carefully rolled them until he was on top. He caught Aziraphale’s hands in his own, holding them still as he kissed him, lingering and gently. He couldn’t come up with any soothing words, so he let his body speak for him, smoothing his hands across Aziraphale’s skin until he could feel the frantic tension melt out of his body, replaced by another, far more pleasant kind of tension all together. Then he stopped holding back, letting them both be swept away by each other until neither could remember how to string together a coherent phrase, much less consider impending doom.

Afterward they lay together on the couch. Crowley hadn’t given up his place on top, and was sprawled down the length of Aziraphale, using his chest as a pillow. Crowley liked a nice doze after these activities, preferably with company*. As Aziraphale didn’t sleep, he’d had to devise some strategies to achieve this; trapping the angel under his body as he napped was the most foolproof method he’d found yet.

*Company that would stay put without having to actually be _asked_, if you please. 

He didn’t nap for long—the slow movement of Aziraphale’s hands, gently carding through his hair and rubbing his back, was relaxing but not conducive to real sleep. Besides, although Aziraphale was generally willing to indulge him in a cuddle, he was unlikely to be very patient with lying unmoving underneath him for very long.

“Tea’ll be cold,” he mumbled, letting his eyes drift back open. He propped himself up on Aziraphale’s chest for a moment before pushing himself up the rest of the way to sitting.

“Possibly not,” Aziraphale said, following Crowley up and reaching for his own mug. “Some of these new mugs have quite remarkable insulating properties, you know.” 

There was nothing new or remarkable about the plain ceramic that both of the mugs on the table were made of, and Crowley was about to say so. But when he touched his own mug it was in fact still warm, almost too hot to hold comfortably. 

“Wasn’t all that long, really,” Aziraphale said, catching his look. “It’s probably terribly oversteeped, though.”

“Mmm.” Crowly took a careful sip and, for once, didn’t burn his tongue. Just the perfect temperature, in fact. He’d never considered these specific activities as a way to pass the time while his tea cooled to a drinkable temperature, but he’d have to keep it in mind for future endeavors.

As the afternoon turned into evening the household descended into its usual quiet. Crowley sank gradually lower on the couch, eyes fixed on his phone, while Azriaphale disappeared into his book. He seemed reluctant, still, to move away; he hadn’t retreated to his own end of the sofa but was still sitting next to Crowley, close enough to brush him with his elbow every time he turned a page.

They stayed like that until it Crowley found himself yawning hopelessly. He made it to his feet, kissing Aziraphale along the way, and wandered off to bed. He’d expected his mind to be racing too frantically to rest, but instead it seemed to have descended into thoughtlessness, and he barely even remembered closing his eyes.

It was still dark when Crowley woke—not entirely unusual, but he could feel that it was still long before his alarm was going to go off. The bed next to him was empty, but that too was fairly common. Aziraphale got restless, sitting still all night, and he worried that even the low level of light he needed to read would disrupt Crowley’s sleep. Crowley had rather hoped, though, that perhaps tonight of all nights he’d be graced with the angel’s company. He’d thought that both of them could use it.

But the other half of the bed was cold, and the room was fully dark. On any other night Crowley would have rolled over and gone back to sleep, contented with the picture of Aziraphale curled up in the armchair in his office, absorbed in his book. Tonight, though, a sense of lingering unease—and what could possibly have caused that, a caustic voice in his head asked—drove him out of bed to find his fiancé.

The light was on in the study, spilling out into the hallway, and Crowley made a beeline for it, blinking as his eyes adjusted. He peered around the doorway. The study was a sight. Aziraphale’s style could at the best of times be called “comfortably cluttered.” This was far beyond that. Books covered every horizontal surface—stacked across half the desk, both chairs, and the floor. Most of the volumes on the desk had bookmarks sticking out in all directions. A few of the stacks were topped with some of the scrolls that Crowley would never, ever have dared to look at too hard, much less breathe on or touch. The remainder of the desk has filled with a couple of open volumes and drifts of paper, all covered with Aziraphale’s neat handwriting. 

Aziraphale himself was standing by the desk, next to the overburdened chair, looking down at the book that was currently open and writing something down on what looked like a pilfered sheet torn off of the roll of tracing paper in Crowley’s study. He hadn’t looked up when Crowley appeared in the doorway, but apparently he hadn’t actually gone unnoticed.

“I should have noticed.” Aziraphale spoke as if he were finishing a thought in a conversation they were already having, turning to the now nearly empty shelves and fretfully pulling out another book. “There are signs. Portents. Oh, if I’d just been paying attention—”

He really needed to be much more awake for this conversation, but it didn’t appear that it could wait. “What good would it have done?” Crowley asked, leaning comfortably against the doorframe and watching as the angel pulled on a pair of gloves. He stood for a long moment, staring down at the volume in his hands. Rather than opening it, though, he dropped it abruptly on the desk. The sound it made wasn’t loud, but it didn’t have to be. It was shocking enough to see Aziraphale treat any of his books with such carelessness.

“What’s the point of all these books, then?” Aziraphale said, voice rising sharply. “The best collection of prophecies in the world, and what for? I didn’t notice it coming, and now it’s too late, and I didn’t even _know_—”

“Hey, hey.” Crowley pushed himself away from the doorway, reaching out gently to pull Aziraphale away from the desk and into his arms. “Take a breath, angel. And what was that all about, it’s too late?”

“You heard Gabriel,” Aziraphale said, muffled against his shoulder. “Three months, that’s all that we have left, and then it’s all over. And I’m—” his voice broke, and he slipped out of Crowley’s arm, turning away. “I’m not ready,” he said, sounding choked.

“Here, angel,” Crowley said gently, reaching out a hand, then letting it fall again. Aziraphale took another half step away, edging just out of reach. It was probably a coincidence, Crowley told himself. “Don’t panic yet. Tell me more about this Armageddon thing. Gabriel wasn’t very specific.” 

Aziraphale huffed in annoyance, but settled into more familiar didactic tones, unfocused gaze fixed on the opposite wall, hands folded tightly in front of his middle. “The prophecies differ in some of the details, but the basic picture is clear. It’s the end of the Earth—and all the kingdoms thereof. Your usual stuff; the seas boil, the kraken rises, stars fall. The four horsemen ride out. They—” his voice wavered, but held, “Result in the destruction of human life. It’s not entirely clear how that will happen. And then the forces of Heaven and Hell finish the War, and one side wins for good. It’s all started by the presence of the Antichrist on Earth.”

“And then what?” Crowley asked, setting aside the destruction of human life. “What happens after?” 

“After?” Aziraphale asked. He gazed off into space, apparently lost in thought. Perhaps he needed a moment, Crowley thought, and glanced down at the papers covering the desk. He couldn’t read a word of them, he realized—most were covered in a complext network symbols or words that he couldn’t recognize. He remembered, again, that being an angel meant more than having wings, filing perfect tax returns, and never swearing. 

“Angel?” he prompted, as the silence went on.

“Mmm? Right,” Aziraphale said, finally turning to look at him. “Heaven _will _win, of course,” he said briskly, and Crowley blinked. He recognized, by now, when Aziraphale was lying, even if it was to himself. “And then that’s, well, that. Permanently, I suppose.”

Crowley digested this. “And what about you?” he asked. “Once Heaven’s won, will you be—” 

Aziraphale’s head snapped up, and for the first time he seemed to actually focus on Crowley, standing in front of him. “That’s what you’re worried about?” He sounded genuinely surprised. “Me?” 

It was Crowley’s turn to stare. “Well, yeah,” he said flatly. “You’re not exactly on the best of terms with—”

“Oh, my dear,” Aziraphale interrupted, sounding overcome. He reached out and squeezed Crowley’s arm, the cotton of the gloves that he was wearing soft but less satisfying than his bare hand. “You needn’t fret. I’ll be right as rain.” 

“But if Gabriel—” Crowley started. He wasn’t even sure what he was afraid of, but he knew that he didn’t trust anyone who’d make Aziraphale look as anxious as the Archangel had.

“Don’t worry about Gabriel,” Aziraphale said, and there was an unaccustomed note of steel in his voice. “And don’t worry about me either. It’s not your job to protect me, love, after all. Rather the reverse.” 

“Wait, what—” Crowley tried to protest, but once again Aziraphale had stopped listening. His attention was back on the books.

“I’m trying to track down the signs,” he said, absently running a finger down one of the pages of notes. He reached for the newest book on the desk, opening it apparently at random and staring down at the page with a disatisfied expression before closing it again. “Narrow things down with a little more precision. Figure out how I didn’t seen this coming. Of course, none of them are particularly precise,” he added, a frustrated edge to his tone. “More focused on rhyme and scansion than details like _when _or _where_. It’s all signs in the stars without saying what one should actually, you know, _look _for. And the newspapers don’t report on things like two-headed calves or meaningfully-shaped vegetables anymore, so how is that supposed to help? ” 

Crowley briefly debated pointing Aziraphale towards the internet, if he wanted such things, but rapidly reconsidered. He’d tried it a time or two before and it had never ended well. Aziraphale had been adapting to new technologies for thousands of years, perhaps, but he seemed to have a fundamental incompatibility with the world wide web.*

*Crowley had long ago stopped suggesting that he get a smart phone, mostly out of fear of what he’d do with it.

“How is any of this supposed to help?” Aziraphale was demanding. “There’s nothing here I can work with! It’s all portents and signs but there’s still no real warning, not when it matters, just _Gabriel_, of all people, showing up and telling us—"

_Ok_, Crowley thought frantically. _Ignore the bits about the end of the world. Talk him down. Just like you do when there are two estate sales on the same day and he can’t decide which one will have the better catalogue. You know how to do that._

“Angel,” he said. This time when he stepped forward Aziraphale stayed put, and Crowley managed to get an arm around his shoulder. “It’s not going to change anything. Even you can’t turn time back and try it again to see it coming. Now we know. You don’t need to find more. Not right now.”

“The coming of the end was all they ever wanted to write about, really,” Aziraphale said quietly, the fight gone from his voice. “And then I missed it all entirely.”

“It’s not your fault, angel,” Crowley said gently, coaxingly. “You’ve done enough for tonight. Come back to bed, yeah?” 

Aziraphale looked at him, reaching out a hand to brush the skin under his eye, which was doubtlessly already darkening with sleeplessness. “You need to rest,” he said. “I shouldn’t like to disturb you.”

Crowley caught his wrist, holding his hand there so he could lean his cheek into it. “Please?” He let a little bit of his own emotions leak into his voice and eyes. “You won’t bother me. I just want—” 

Aziraphale visibly softened, cupping Crowley’s cheek in his hand and leaning their shoulders together. “Of course, my dear.” He cast a look back at the books but followed Crowley out of the study, flicking the light off as they left. 

The bed was cold again when Crowley crawled under the covers, but it dipped under Aziraphale’s weight as he followed him, and then there was a warm body at his back. Aziraphale squeaked and muttered something uncomplimentary when Crowley tucked his feet, always freezing, back against his calves. But he moved closer instead of away, and Crowley, who honestly hadn’t expected to fall asleep again, found himself lulled. The warmth, and the closeness, and the presence of another body breathing beside his* all combined to let his muscles unwind even against his will, and his eyelids sagged closed. He felt the light kiss that Aziraphale dropped onto his hair and heard the turning of a page, and that was all he knew. 

*Most of the time, anyway. The first few times that Crowley had convinced Aziraphale to accompany him to bed he’d be jolted rudely awake several times in the night by an eerie stillness where a formerly-breathing body had been. In the morning Aziraphale had admitted sheepishly that sometimes he forgot, especially when he’d arrived at particularly exciting moments in his book. Eventually, it had stopped waking him up.

**

The next morning was one of the most surreal that Crowley had ever experienced, surmounted only by the first time he’d woken up in the bookshop, attended by the man he’d just learned was an angel. The angel was there this time too, when he finally woke, an arm still tucked firmly around his shoulders.

Neither of them made any mention of the previous night. Crowley sucked down a cup of coffee, took a piece of toast to stop Aziraphale nagging, and made his escape to the office.

He informed his neighbors that he was not to be disturbed, closed his door carefully, sat down at his desk, and gave himself half an hour to panic. It progressed nicely—he’d moved on from frantic pacing to nearly hyperventillating with plenty of time left, and had reached the stage of muttering to himself and offering impossible bargains in return for the safety of 1) Aziraphale, 2) the Bentley, 3) himself, and 4) the world by the time his timer went off. He brushed a finger across his phone to silence it and let himself sink back into the chair. Right. That was enough of that.

It was absurd to imagine that the world was really going to end. The very idea was impossible to deal with, really. So impossible that Crowley decided, quite firmly, that it wasn’t going to happen. Things were going to work out. There was no way the world would be destroyed before Britain had even managed to leave the EU.

Something would clearly have to be done. Crowley had no faith in—well, in much of anything, but particularly not in Heaven stepping in and stopping it, no matter that the antichrist was apparently a product of Hellish influences. Gabriel hadn’t had the frantic energy of someone desperately trying to stave off disaster; rather, he’d reminded Crowley of friends from his student days, gearing up for an exam in a subject that they knew well, tense but not with the expectation of failure. Looking forward to the challenge at least as much as they were dreading it. 

No, Crowley was decidedly _not _going to pin his hopes on Heaven. 

That left either Hell, which clearly wasn’t going to do anything to stop all this, or Earth. Which probably meant, as far as Crowley could figure, him and Aziraphale. As the only two who weren’t enjoying blissful ignorance, it was inevitably going to fall to them. 

Crowley got up and unlocked his door, although he didn’t do anything so welcoming as open it. With that settled in his mind, all he could do was wait for Aziraphale’s plan. He might as well get on with some work in the meantime. 

Arriving home, he found Aziraphale in the study, surrounded by an ever-expanding hoard of note paper and books, having apparently forgotten to open the shop entirely. He seemed abstracted all through dinner, and Crowley didn’t try to break in on his thoughts. He slept alone in the bed that night.

By the next morning, though, the winds had changed. Crowley didn’t realize the extent of it until he was on his way out the door, when Aziraphale accompanied him downstairs and showed every sign of opening the shop.

“Bit early to be opening, isn’t it?” 

Aziraphale hummed noncommitally. “I wanted to rearrange some things, I might as well get started.”

Crowley was a bit surprised that he wasn’t still buried in his private collection, but this part was decidedly more Aziraphale’s sphere than his. He settled for kissing the angel even more enthusiastically than usual, and made his way out the door. 

It was late that evening before he happened to glance into Aziraphale’s study has he was walking past. He stopped in his tracks, staring in. It was as pristine as the day they’d moved Aziraphale’s books in. The desk was spotless, the books all lined up neatly on the shelves, with not even a single sheet of paper in sight. 

Aziraphale, following him down the hallway, gave a little huff of frustration at the abrupt stop, then a quiet laugh when he realized what had caught Crowley’s attention. “I just did a bit of a tidy,” he said.

“I’d forgotten what that desk looked like, is all,” Crowley drawled.

Aziraphale huffed again. “It’s not nearly as dramatic as all that,” he insisted. “You’d think I never put anything away, the way you carry on.”

Crowley decided not to comment on that one. The better part of valor, and all. Later, though, as he lay in bed, Aziraphale sitting next to him reading in the dim light of his lamp, he wondered.

After a few days of silence on the matter, Crowley had had enough. Ignoring the situation was getting even more untenable than Aziraphale’s earlier worry had been. There had been plenty of time to absorb the news and work through the panic, he thought. It was time to figure out what to do.

He stopped for take-away from a favorite curry place—if it were the last time he’d better make the most of it, said the dark little voice that had started thinking such things, and he ordered several dishes and an extra helping of naan. He waited until after dinner this time, though, perching on the sofa in the back room as he had so many times, containters spread across the low table as he commented that they had a real dining room, you know. Aziraphale gave that the same attention as usual—none—talking cheerfully about his day and listening to Crowley’s stories.

“There’s a new show at Albert Hall,” Aziraphale said as Crowley tidied the now-empty containers away and poured each of them a third glass of wine. “The philharmonic’s finally playing some real music instead of another one of those ridiculous ‘pops’ concerts. Sibellius and Beethoven, plus some Elgar. I thought perhaps I might get some tickets.”

That seemed like as good a segue as he was going to get. “Speaking of plans, angel,” he said, trying to sound casual. He apparently failed, judging by the way that Aziraphale’s back stiffened before he turned back around.

“Yes?”

“I was just wondering.” He had to stop and swallow, trying to get his voice under control. “What you were planning.”

He could see the moment that Aziraphale decided to play dumb. “I was just going to call the box office,” he said. “I suppose we could make reservations for dinner before—"

“Aziraphale,” Crowley said flatly. The angel seemed to deflate a little, turning and leaning back against his desk, watching Crowley warily. “What are you going to do? About Armageddon?”

Aziraphale wouldn’t meet his eyes. His hands had latched firmly onto the desk, knuckles turning white, and Crowley had a sudden horrified memory of him standing in the same spot, a covertly terrified expression on his face, while Gabriel towered above him. “I wasn’t, er, well,” he said weakly.

It was Crowley’s turn to frown in surprise. “You weren’t what?” he asked. He wanted to get up off the sofa and go over to the angel, but he didn’t think he could bear it Aziraphale looked at him the way he’d looked at Gabriel, and he stayed on the sofa.

“I mean, I’ve done what research I could,” Aziraphale said, waving a hand rather weakly in the vague direction of his study upstairs. “It does, er, appear to be the case. There have been certain signs, once I knew to go looking for them. Armageddon is indeed imminent.”

“We knew that,” Crowley hissed. “What I meant is what are you—we—whoever—going to do about it?”

“Do about it?” Aziraphale echoed him. 

Crowley stared at him, raising his eyebrows. “You were planning on doing something about it, right?”

Aziraphale frowned. “It’s Armageddon. It’s inevitable. The Antichrist is on Earth. There’s nothing to be done.” 

“So, what, you’re just going to sit back and watch it happen? Come on, angel,” Crowley said, not even trying to hide the impatience in his voice anymore. “You have all those books, you can figure it out. Do something to stop it.” 

“I can’t,” Aziraphale said tightly.

Crowley stared at him in disbelief. “You have to.”

“I can’t!” Aziraphe said more sharply, looking studiously away. 

“This isn’t a strongly worded letter from the neighborhood beautification committee, angel! This is the end of the world. You have to do something.”

“It isn’t a question of whether I _want _to do anything,” Aziraphale said. There was a new tone in his voice—something Crowley would almost call despair. “But the arrival of Armageddon is part of the Great Plan. I can’t do anything about it.” 

“Fuck the plan,” Crowley hissed. “Don’t you remember? You don’t work for them anymore."

Aziraphale shifted from side to side, looking like he wanted to disappear. “I can’t go against the Almighty’s plan, Crowley. I may have gone, er, a bit freelance—”

“I think the term you’re looking for is ‘renegade’,” Crowley interjected. 

“But that hasn’t changed this,” Aziraphale continued, ignoring him completely.

“Why not?” Crowley demanded. “What have they—she—ever done to earn that? Don’t you care about—” He was, horrifyingly, about to say _me_, but fortunately for the sake of his pride his voice cracked before he could. “The world?” he managed to finish.

“Of course I do,” Aziraphale said. His eyes were fixed somewhere behind Crowley’s left shoulder. “I—if I could, I would—I would do anything, Crowley. But I _can’t_.”

“Of course you can.” Crowley leaned forward, trying to catch Aziraphale’s gaze. If he could just get him to listen, he’d have to give in. “That’s just what people say when they don’t want to make the difficult choice.”

“It’s what _humans _say when they don’t want to make a choice,” Aziraphale said shakily. “But it’s different. I’m not human.”

“So you keep saying,” Crowley muttered. It had, indeed, been something of a refrain since the very beginning of their relationship, although it had died down rather in the past few years. He’d hoped that the trend would be permanent.

“And I _can’t __make _that choice. You don’t understand, Crowley.” He’d never appreciated that phrase on Aziraphale’s tongue, even the first time it had appeared; repetition hadn’t helped. He bit back his response, though, and let Aziraphale continue. “I’m an angel. We don’t have free will.” 

Crowley stared at him. “You what?”

Aziraphale had started to pace absently around the room, putting out a hand to fend off various pieces of furniture whenever he fetched up against them. “There are gifts that the Almighty kept for hu—you,” he explained. “Imaginations, and the ability to create, and ask questions, and—and free will. I don’t have that. I never have.”

Crowley was still staring, incredulous. “You’re not serious,” he said flatly.

“Of course I am,” Aziraphale snapped. “I was made to serve God’s plan. That is all I am capable of doing. You humans can make whatever choices you want—turn to good or evil as you see fit, decide how you want to live in the world. We simply do not have the capacity to do that. It’s not in our nature.”

“You have got to be kidding me right now.” Aziraphale’s eyes flashed, and Crowley knew that he should have phrased it differently, but now he was on a roll. “You seriously believe that you can’t make your own choices?” 

“Not about this,” Aziraphale insisted. “I know that seems incomprehensible to you. But we have fundamentally different natures. I tried to tell—”

Crowley waved an impatient hand. “I don’t know about angels generally, and I don’t care. But you’re trying to tell me that you, specifically, don’t have free will?”

Aziraphale glared. “Yes,” he said shortly. “That’s exactly—”

Crowley couldn’t help the laugh that escaped. “You seriously think that you, Aziraphale, lack the capacity to make your own choices? _You_?”

Aziraphale’s whole face had flushed very pink by now, though from irritation or embarassment or just the alcohol, Crowley couldn’t tell. “I’m an angel,” he said again. “It’s not something we were given.”

“That’s bullshit, angel.” Crowley ignored Aziraphale’s shocked gasp, continuing before he could recover from his offence. “You left Heaven. Nearly a thousand years ago. You looked around and said, ‘that’s not the plan for me,’ and you walked. Pretty sure you didn’t have permission for that.”

“That’s not the same,” Aziraphale protested.

“How?” Crowley demanded.

“That wasn’t directly countering—”

“Wasn’t it?” Crowley asked. “How can you know?”

“If it were, I wouldn’t have been able to do it,” Aziraphale said, in one of the most beautifully circular displays of logic that Crowley had seen him produce yet.

“You know your logical fallacies better than that,” Crowley scoffed. “You know perfectly well that you started asking questions and couldn’t find good answers, so you _made a choice _to get out while the getting was good. If you could manage to run off from your Heavenly job once, I don’t see what’s to stop you from trying to keep them from destroying the planet, and, in case you’ve forgotten, _everyone living on it_.”

Aziraphale’s gaze finally rose to meet his. His eyes had gone hard, under the slight haze of alcohol, and Crowley started to have a niggling sensation that in his own state his tongue had been somewhat looser than was wise. 

“I think I will buy those tickets, then,” the angel said in a flat tone.

“Aziraphale—” Crowley protested.

“I’ve always been quite fond of Beethoven, you know, and Sibellius is always a favorite. The Elgar is a bit of a shame, perhaps, but we can’t have everything.”

“No,” Crowley snapped, loudly enough to cut through Aziraphale’s digression. “No, you don’t get to do that this time. I don’t care if you don’t feel like talking about this. It’s too important for you to try to wiggle out of it.”

Aziraphale didn’t try to keep talking about the classical composers. Instead he sat frozen for a long minute, face working, before he abruptly stood.

“I’m going for a walk,” he announced. His voice and eyes were suddenly clearer than they had been for a couple of glasses now, and Crowley squinted at him in sudden suspicion.

“Aziraphale—” he tried to protest.

“I won’t be long,” he said, with an unconvincing little smile. “You needn’t wait up if you don’t wish to, though,” he added over his shoulder as he slipped out through the front door.

Crowley stared after him, almost disbelieving. He’d seen Aziraphale try (often successfully) to ignore whatever he didn’t want to deal with, but he rarely cut Crowley off so comprehensively. And he’d never just walked away. 

There was a distinct impulse to apologize when the angel got back, but he tried to quash it. He hadn’t been wrong when he’d said this was too serious to just drop. Some things were more important than pre-marital bliss. Making sure that the world was still around when it made it to marital bliss, for one.

He eyed the bottle of wine. The smart thing to do would be to drink a glass of water so that he’d be relatively clear-headed by the time Aziraphale got back. It was going to be a tricky enough discussion even with his wits around him. Instead, he found himself on his feet, fetching the bottle of his favorite scotch from the cupboard. If Aziraphale got to escape, it only seemed fair that he did too.

The forty-five minutes that Aziraphale was gone turned out to be plenty of time to drink rather more than one glass of scotch. Crowley had wound up mostly horizontal on the couch, staring at his currently-empty glass and trying muzzily to figure out if he had the will power to get up and re-fill it, when the door opened to let in Aziraphale, along with a gust of cool air. 

The angel’s cheeks were flushed pink with the chill and the exertion of walking. Although he hadn’t bothered to take a coat he still paused by the coatrack for a moment before stepping around the bookshelves to look down at the figure on the sofa.

“Crowley.” There was a hint of disapproval in his voice.

“Angel,” Crowley said. It wasn’t a word that needed precision, and a part of his brain that fancied itself rather soberer than the rest thought that maybe he’d managed to hide how thick his tongue felt in his mouth.

“Now, really, my dear.” The disapproval had given up on polite hints, and was now making itself right at home, pouring tea and helping itself to biscuits out of tin. “We really can’t have a conversation like this.”

Crowley laughed. “You didn’t want to have a cons—covs—conversation anyway.”

Aziraphale sighed sharply and made a vague gesture with his hand. There was an unpleasant sensation—rather like Crowley had always imagined water would feel, going down a drain—and then Crowley’s head felt perfectly clear.

“What the fuck—angel.”

“You were the one who wanted to talk,” Aziraphale said primly.

“So you—you miracled me sober?” Crowley had had his suspicious earlier, but he still wasn’t really ready for the confirmation like this.

Aziraphale sat down on the opposite chair, spine perfectly straight, hands folded in his lap. Only the way his knuckles turned white from the strength of his grip betrayed his tension. “Do you want to have a reasonable conversation or not?”

Crowley stubbornly refused to straighten up, lounging agressively across the sofa. “Ok, fine. Let’s have a conversation. What the fuck is up with the miracles? I thought you really weren’t supposed to do those either, but that’s at least two tonight. Oh, the tea from a few nights ago,” he added, feeling retroactively rather foolish. “You’re racking up quite a few little transgressions there, eh?”

The barb didn’t land. “I think the time for worrying about minor miracles is rather past,” Aziraphale said, looking unconcerned. “The possible range of resprimands is rather limited, at this point.” 

Crowley squinted at him. “So it’s fine to ignore one set of orders when you don’t feel like it any more so that you can to heat up tea and sober me up, but actually doing anything about the imminent end of the world is completely beyond the pale?”

Aziraphale started to bristle, but Crowley could see him decide to set the defensiveness aside. “It’s not the same. The one was just an administrative memo. Not even the level of holy scripture. Armageddon is part of the Great Plan. It’s what everything was created for in the first place.”

“Like making a sand castle just so that you can kick it down?” Crowley asked bitterly. “Seems like a particularly loving plan to you, does it?”

Aziraphale flinched at that. “You can’t expect me to explain explain the will of the Almighty, Crowley. It’s—”

“Ineffable,” Crowley growled. They sat in silence for a moment. “Pretty sure that the main advantage of going rogue is not getting to ignore whatever batshit idea the boss you left behind comes up with.”

Aziraphale flinched again, shoulders hunching up in a marked deviation from his usually perfect posture. “I never wanted to turn away from God,” he said quietly. “Even when I didn’t understand, even when it was Her orders I didn’t understand, I never—I never gave up my faith. In Heaven, maybe, but not in Her.”

Crowley changed tacks instantly. “And what’s to say you have to? You said it yourself, what Heaven says and what she says aren’t quite the same thing. The Antichrist isn’t one of hers, is he? Comes from Hell, right? Maybe stopping it would be the _good _thing to do.”

“It’s the Great Plan,” Aziraphale said again, and Crowley gritted his teeth against the words he wanted to use to describe the Great Plan. Cursing at God wouldn’t help him make his case right now. “Of course it’s supposed to happen.” 

Crowley shrugged, trying to look unconcerned. “Do you really know that? Maybe the plan is for someone to thwart it before it can really get going. It’d make a lot more sense, if you think about. Instead of blowing it all up just as it was really starting to get going.”

Aziraphale bit his lip. He was thinking about it, he was. Crowley held his breath, biting his own tongue to keep himself from babbling on. This die was cast, all he could do was see how it fell. 

“No,” Aziraphale said eventually, and Crowley felt his heart drop. “I—I see what you’re trying to do, you know,” he added with an attempt at a smile. “I wish—but it can’t be. The Plan can’t be for me to stop it, because I can’t go against Her word. If She wanted us to be able to do that sort of thing, She’d have given us free will to start with.”

“So who cares if you were given it,” Crowley said, pitching his voice low and intense. He leaned forward, catching Aziraphale’s eyes with his. “Take it.”

“I—I—” Azirapahel stuttered, and for a moment Crowley thought that it was going to work. “No,” he said, and there was absolute finality in his voice. “No. I’m sorry, I really am, but _I can’t_.”

It knocked the breath out of him. Ideas flitted frantically across his brain—he could try crying, or throwing a tantrum and threatening Aziraphale that he’d never forgive him, or keep trying angles until he found that one perfect argument that all the angel’s logic wouldn’t be able to counter. But he didn’t give voice to any of them. Aziraphale knew perfectly well what was at stake. If that wasn’t enough to move him, then nothing would.

He was, abruptly, too tired to keep fighting. He sagged back against the sofa. Aziraphale’s brows pinched in worry and suddenly he was up from his chair and brushing past the table to fall to his knees next to the sofa. He took Crowley’s hands in his—they felt impossibly warm against his chilly fingers—folding them carefully between his own. “I didn’t want—” he started, and then had to turn his head and blink strongly a few times before he could look at Crowley again. “There’s so little time,” he said, voice almost a whisper. “I didn’t want to spend it all being afraid. Crowley, my love, can we—can we just—” His voice broke again but he didn’t look away this time, still watching Crowley.

Crowley softened all at once, pulling one hand free only to wipe gently at the tears pooling on Aziraphale’s eyelashes. “Sure, angel,” he found himself saying. “Of course I’ll spend it with you. Whatever you want. Want to take a trip somewhere?” he found himself asking wildly. “No point saving up my vacation time.” It startled a faint, slightly damp laugh out of Aziraphale, and Crowley found himself smiling more widely than the weak joke deserved.

“London’s good enough for me,” Aziraphale murmured. He leaned forward far enough to rest his forehead against Crowley’s arm where it lay on the sofa. They stayed there for a long time, as the evening faded into night.

**

Apparently in Aziraphale’s world, ignoring the upcoming apocalypse meant that it was time to kick wedding planning into high gear. He’d asked Crowley to keep Saturday clear, and greeted him that morning with a hefty binder filled, as far as Crowley could tell, entirely with spreadsheets that rivaled anything any of his company’s project managers could produce. Aziraphale hummed happily as Crowley tried desperately to drink enough copy to cope with the sudden appearance of a day-of timeline—just a generic one, a draft to get started with, of course, Aziraphale assured him, until they’d nailed down some other details and could actually start customizing—and pretend that he was paying attention. If they were going to have a wedding he was going to be involved, he was determined on that, but surely this was more than any mortal could be asked to endure before he’d even brushed his teeth.

A loose page slid out of the stack and floated to the floor. Crowley bent to pick it up, glancing down at is as he did; the page that was covered in dense symbols, arranged in what appeared to be equations. He squinted at them—something about the shape of them rang a familiar bell, something he should recognize from somewhere. He was good with equations. Surely if he could just ignore the vague feeling that part of his brain was melting and focus, he could figure it out.

Aziraphale looked down at the page and tutted, pulling it firmly out of Crowley’s grip. “Do focus, please, my dear. We have plenty to do today, no need to get distracted by the contingency plan.” 

Crowley spared a moment to wonder just exactly what kind of “contingency plan” that particular mind-bending schematic was before looking down at the itinerary that Aziraphale had just shoved under his nose. A couple of hours in the morning to draft a preliminary guest list and discuss ideas, a nice lunch out at a restaurant that Aziraphale had been wanting to get back to for months, visiting a venue or two, and, obviously a carefully-planned treat, a late afternoon cake tasting. Aziraphale was, apparently, practicing a rare fit of abstemiousness; Crowley knew perfectly well that that particular bakery was, at best, his fifth-favorite for cakes. Numbers four through one would, he was sure, be appearing in the coming weeks. Aziraphale might have been rather appalled by the extent of modern wedding “traditions”, but he was clearly not above adopting the ones that appealled, and an excuse to eat cake was never to be sniffed at. 

“Do we really need to invite all of my co-workers?” he asked hoplessly, looking down at the result of their first hour’s work. Aziraphale had been writing steadily, and the resulting list was startling long for two prospective grooms with virtually no families and, in the case of one, a quite limited pool of friends.

“Not if you don’t wish to,” Aziraphale said mildly. “But if you’re inviting more than a few, we should include all of them, I thought.”

“You do realize that that would mean including Lionel, don’t you?” Crowley drawled. Aziraphale frowned, apparently conflicted between his natural instinct to be hospitable* and his deep-seated dislike of Crowley’s boss, before taking up the pen again and drawing a rather restrained line through several names.

*An instinct that was notable for its precisely delimited range of influence; it applied only to locations other than the bookshop.

“Maybe just your direct team,” he muttered. 

Crowley tugged the page gently out of his hand and glanced over it. Aziraphale hadn’t done anything as obvious as listing the names in two columns, but they were somewhat organized by his flow of thought, and some patterns were evident even at a brief glance. “There isn’t anyone else you want to invite?” he asked carefully.

It was a relief when Aziraphale smiled back at him gently. “It’s a bit unbalanced, I know. No old school friends to invite, I’m afraid. Don’t worry about it,” he added in response to whatever face Crowley was making. “You’ll be there, that’s all I really care about. Besides, it’s only a preliminary list for the numbers. We can add more as we think of them.”

Crowley had shrugged and let it go, happy enough to move onto priorities for the reception. His suggestion of a DJ being rejected with extreme prejudice—Aziraphale pronounced, accurately enough, that he only wanted to see the faces the angel would make at what passed for music these days—a hypothetical band was tentatively accepted as a compromise.

“You realize you’ll have to dance with me,” Crowley said wickedly. It was one of the few things they’d never done, Aziraphale always flatly refusing to follow Crowley out onto the floor at the weddings or parties that they’d attended. “At least one dance.”

A flash of panic crossed Aziraphale’s eyes, but he straightened his spine to an even more perfect line. “I’m quite sure I can manage that, my dear,” he said with great dignity, then relaxed enough to smile surprisingly sweetly at him. “I expect it will be quite lovely.”

Crowley found he couldn’t be quite as annoyed as he intended about the angel taking all the fun out of teasing him.

Aziraphale’s eagerness to focus on the more earthly aspects of future plans did not extend, however, to just any topic, as Crowley found out what had previously been the elephant in the room*. The moment he said the word “Tokyo” Aziraphale’s face closed and he turned the subject without even an attempt at finesse. Crowley ground his teeth and followed.

*More recent developments had reduced to the relatively size of, say, a rather large rabbit.

The first venue was clearly not a good fit—the manager had visibly raised an eyebrow at Aziraphale’s clothing, which had resulted in Crowley drawlingly and deliberately winding her up in petty revenge, steadily ignoring Aziraphale’s glares and, subsequently, hopeless giggles, until they were practically asked to leave.

The next one was better from the moment they walked in the doors. The historic building had caught Crowley’s attention a week or two previously. He’d stopped in just long enough to brag a brochure and establish that they were licensed for weddings. Apparently Aziraphale had remembered his brief description and had approved of the brochure, and had gone ahead and booked a walk-through. 

Although the hall itself was nice, the star of the show was unquestionably the garden. Surrounded by buildings on two sides and a wall on the others, the omnipresent noises of Soho were, if not absent, at least somewhat muffled. Trees cast most of it into deep shade, but clematis and roses climbed the sunny wall, and foliage in wildly variegated greens lined the walkways. 

The first glitch hiccup come until the manager was showing them around the hall, describing the layout for dinner and detailing the possibilities for a high table. “You both, of course, and your families, and perhaps the wedding party—” She gave them a bright, expectant look.

Aziraphale shifted his weight, face settling into the faintly shifty look that he got when he wasn’t quite sure how to get out of a very human situation. Crowley squeezed his hand gently and stepped in. “No parents or close family,” he said, voice only slightly clipped. “And we weren’t planning on a wedding party.”

Her gaze flicked down to their joined hands, and Crowley could see her jump to a conclusion as to why they might not have family in attendance. Her face didn’t turn pitying, though, and she moved easily on into a discussion of a possible sweetheart table for two. Crowley, although he had to fight not to make a face at the name, provisionally decided that she might be possible to work with.

It wasn’t true, what the manager had decided about why their parents wouldn’t be there. Crowley’s last set of foster parents had been good to him and he, in turn, had been fond enough of them. They’d started fostering children in their retirement, though, and it hadn’t left them much time. They’d died within six months of each other, while Crowley was still in his last year of school. They hadn’t always understood him—fair enough, at the time Crowley hadn’t usually understood himself—but they had loved him as they’d loved all their children, and they would have been there if they could. Crowley wasn’t close with any of his former foster siblings, but he’d kept track of a few; they’d been the first names that Aziraphale had added to his list. 

The manager had stepped away for a moment, anwering a call. Crowley glanced over at Aziraphale, and found that he was being watched in return. Their eyes met; Aziraphale’s were bright with pleased approval. Crowley considered for a moment; the shaded garden, the tall and handsome hall where they now stood, Aziraphale looking perfectly at home against the fluted pillars, and gave a decisive nod. Aziraphale brightened even further. As the manager tucked her phone away and turned back to them, he gave her his sunniest smile, and asked about availability.

“We do generally book quite a ways ahead,” she said. “We’re pretty much full for spring, but we have a some dates still available for next summer and fall.”

“Ah,” Aziraphale said, face falling. “We had hoped, rather, for something a bit sooner than that.”

She gave him a sympathetic smile. “Unfortunately, we generally are booked nearly a year out. I think you’ll find the same for most of the venues in the area. The only day in the next eight months that we’re free at all is the cancellation I got this morning.”

Aziraphale perked back up at that. “Cancellation? And when was that?”

“Early August.” 

Aziraphale looked at Crowley, who nodded again. “We’ll take it,” he said firmly.

The manager’s eyes widened in surprise. “Really?” she asked, sounding dubious. “It’s barely more than two months away. It’s a very compressed timeline—”

“We’ll make it work,” Aziraphale said firmly. “Two monthis is perfect. Now, I imagine there’s some paperwork to sign?”

It didn’t take more than half an hour for the manager, slightly dazed under Aziraphale’s rapidly deployed charm offensive, to aquire the necessary signatures and see them politely out the door. 

“You don’t mind the rush, dearest, do you?” Aziraphale asked worriedly as they strolled back down the street, his hand tucked into the crook of Crowley’s elbow. “It may get a bit tricky. But. Well. I didn’t want to miss the opportunity—” 

His eyes, when he looked at Crowley, were overflowing with all the words that they hadn’t been saying for the past few days. The dam had cracked, and the worry and the fear were leaking out. Crowley came to a stop, there in the middle of the sidewalk, grasped Aziraphale’s elbows to turn him towards himself, and leaned in for a kiss. 

“It can’t be too much of a hurry for me, angel,” he murmured against his cheek. The words were true, of course. Especially not, that voice in his brain whispered, under the current circumstances. Sieze the next two months. It's not like there were going to be any more. It had to be better than planning for a wedding that neither truly believed would ever come.

Crowley wasn't sure what he was trying to convince himself of.

**

Through the winter, Crowley’s weekends often hung on a restless note come Sunday afternoon—bored with lazing around, rarely drawn into any of the books that were bound to be around, but with little impetus to go out and find his own entertainment. Aziraphale was of course always the best of distractions, but on the occasions when the angel was disinclined to abandon his own pursuits, Crowley found himself at loose ends. 

As soon as the weather started to thaw, though, the tables were turned. Even before any shoots had started to push their way out of the soil Crowley found himself spending Sunday afternoons in the garden; shifting pots around, amending soil, cleaning and oiling tools, and planting the early seeds. Once the weather was mild enough Aziraphale often joined him, reading in one of the chairs they’d laboriously hauled up and occasionally trying his own foray into being a distraction.

Crowley had been moderately attached to the balcony garden at his old flat; he’d planned the built-in planters from the start, after all, and had ended up quite fond of the effect. It was Aziraphale, though, who’d been nearly inconsolable when he’d realized that Crowley leaving the flat behind would necessarily also entail abandoning the garden. He’d almost gone back on the whole plan, and it was only the lingering vision of Aziraphale’s vast collection of brass candlesticks lined up in his sleek, minimalist living room that had given Crowley the strength to push on. 

It had been a god—well, Someone—send when he first thought about the roof. It was flat, aside from the dome of the oculus, and got plenty of sunlight. He’d revised the renovation plan to fit in a spiral staircase, echoing the one downstairs, that eventually led from the corner of the living room up to what had been the ancient trapdoor up onto the roof. 

The balcony garden had by necessity been carefully planned, each pot and plant fitting into a small, precise puzzle that had looked, by the time they were fully-grown, like barely-managed chaos. The roof, having something like ten times the square footage, was a rather different proposition, and the current version of the garden sprawled across it, aisles and “rooms” feeding into each other in a rather labrynthine effect. 

The plants, as always, thrived. Friends or neighbors who came over for drinks of a meal always asked Crowley, the acknowledged hosehold gardener, for his secrets. He usually recommended an obscenely expensive compost mix and frequent talking-tos. It was generally good for a laugh, and more believable than the truth, which was that Crowley actually had very little to do with it, aside from putting seeds into the soil in the first place. Aziraphale loved the plants whole-heartedly; here, in the heart of the home he’d made for himself here for centuries, they had no choice but to flourish.

This afternoon, blessedly free of the rain that had plagued the last week, he was already deeply absorbed in moving the rapidly bolting biennials from the sheltered spot under the wall where they’d spent the winter to form a bank of color in Aziraphale’s favorite section of cottage-style garden. Aziraphale had spent enough of the past week engaging in starting to pull together concrete plans now that they had a venue that he'd tired of it before the weekend, and had declared it a holiday for both of them. Crowley was more than happy to have the time to work outside. Today the angel was settled comfortably on one of the padded benches near where he rearranging pots, pulling off the layer of dead leaves that had protected the overwintering shoots. 

Crowley sat back and stared, unseeing, at the pot of delphiniums and foxgloves in front of him. If he wanted more blooming next year, he’d need to start the seeds this spring. He couldn’t quite muster up the energy to fill another pot and get the seed packet, though. What would it matter, really? The plants in front of him were the last foxgloves that would ever bloom.

_You don’t have to do this_, he thought, not even sure who he was talking to. Aziraphale could go on about the Almighty as much as he wanted, but Crowley had never really believed that anyone was watching over them and he wasn’t about to start just because his fiancé was an angel. _Why would you make something as perfect as foxgloves and then destroy them all? Humans, sure, you could say we’ve earned that, but the flowers don’t deserve it._

“Crowley?” Aziraphale’s voice was soft, concerned, and much closer than Crowley would have expected. He looked up, forcing his eyes to focus, and found that the angel had abandoned his chair, book set carelessly aside, and was kneeling less than an arm length away, brow pinched and worried.

His eyes widened slightly at whatever he saw as Crowley’s gaze rose to meet his. “You’ve been staring at that pot for a while,” he said carefully. “Is something the matter with them, my dear?” 

“You said forever.” Crowley could barely recognize his own voice, quiet and hoarse.

Aziraphale’s frown deepened. “I’m not sure what—”

“You said,” Crowley insisted, voice stronger. “That you were going to love me forever. That you weren’t going to let anything take me away from you.”

“Oh,” Aziraphale said softly. “Yes, my dear, I did. And I meant it. I promise, I’ll find you—”

“No. I don’t want an afterlife with you.” Aziraphale’s face froze and then just crumpled, looking more pained than Crowley had ever seen him. “That’s not why I wanted to get married, anyway,” Crowley amended hastily. He hadn’t planned these words—hadn’t even known he was going to say them—but as they tumbled from his lips he knew that they were the truth he’d been working towards in his own mind over the past few days. “I wanted to share a _life _with you. Here. On Earth. I didn’t even ask for forever. It’s not—I do want that, too. But I just wanted what the rest of us get with the people we love. And I know it could all end tomorrow,” he hurried on. “That’s part of the whole human deal. And that’s, you know, terrifying, but it’s how it is. We’re mortal. We take what we can get and try to make the most of it.”

“Crowley, my love, I—”

“No, let me finish. I love you, angel, I do, but you can’t say forever and then not try for tomorrow. And if—” It was hard, so hard, to get his numb lips to shape the words, but he forced them out anyway. “If you’re going to put Heaven’s plans above me—above _us_—then maybe we shouldn’t get married after all.”

The words just sat there, an awful, heavy silence settling over them. Crowley couldn’t take his eyes off of Aziraphale’s face, which was twitching, eyes focused somewhere on the ground.

“Crowley.” When Aziraphale finally spoke he sounded broken, more hopeless even than the night after Gabriel had come. “I want—I wish—I _can’t_.”

Crowley couldn’t take it anymore. He surged to his feet, halfway across the roof to the door before he even spoke. “Fine. You can’t do anything to stop it, but you don’t want to be in a war either,” he said, too loudly. “Go on. If it’s all about the Earth anyway I’m sure there’s somewhere out there where you can just ignore all of it. Go on, go find somwhere off in the stars to wait it all out. You won’t even need to think about me.”

He couldn’t stay and hear any more excuses or justifications, or know if Aziraphale took him up on his suggestions. He just needed to leave. He didn’t _want_to be alone, he hadn’t truly wanted that in a very long time, but, well. There were only three months left, after all. He wouldn’t have to survive it for long.

“Crowley!” Aziraphale’s voice was so quiet he could barely hear it above the pounding of his pulse in his ears. “Wait. Please.”

He paused in his steps but didn’t look back, glaring down at a pot of geraniums that sat near his feet.

Aziraphale said something under his breath, too softly for Crowley to catch. “Pardon?” he asked, automatically.

“What I’m going to _do _about it.” Aziraphale’s voice strengthened as he spoke. “Because that’s what people do when they want something to change.”

The words tugged at something deep inside Crowley, something familiar and half-forgotten and _hopeful_. He turned, gaze desperately searching out Aziraphale’s. The angel wasn’t frowning anymore, and there was a new light in his eyes as they met Crowley’s. “You’re right, my love,” he said, crossing the distance between them and holding out his hands. Crowley stared at them for a long moment before reaching out to take them in his own. “Tomorrow with you is worth more than anything in Heaven.”

Crowley stared at him. Something deep inside him that had been winding ever tighter over the past week snapped, quietly and without much fuss. He found himself plastered up against Aziraphale, breathing uneven as he pressed his face into the curve of his neck. A hand reached up and pressed him closer, carding through his hair, while the other circled soothingly against his back.

“Shh, shh,” Aziraphale murmured in his ear. “I’m sorry, my dear.”

After a few minutes Crowley felt his heartrate start to slow. He pressed against Aziraphale for another long moment, just enjoying having him close. “So. What _are _we going to do?”

He could feel Aziraphale’s hand twitch against his neck, and knew he’d caught the change in pronoun. “I’m not sure,” he said thoughtfully. “I believe I shall have to consult my printed authorities.” 

Crowley huffed a laugh. It was a weak effort, but it did the job of diffusing the lingering tension, and he felt Aziraphale’s shoulders relax at the sound. “Of course it’s back to the books,” he said. He unwound himself, pulled back far enough to drop a kiss on Aziraphale’s lips, and turned to lead the way back down to the flat. “Let’s get to it, then. I’ll make some cocoa, shall I?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally! Nothing like the middle of the semester to make me miss my summer posting schedule. This one also just took forever, and then I didn't like the pacing (still not sure it's perfect, but going with it) and had to redo parts.
> 
> I feel like I've written them arguing a lot, and I do just want to say that we're past the worst of it. They do get to do some other stuff in this story, I promise.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note that the rating has gone up a couple of levels!

Most of Aziraphale’s business-related work had remained downstairs in his back room—the ancient account book that recorded all of sales the shop had made in the past two centuries, still blank aside from the first five pages or so, the meticulously updated catalog of the shop’s contents, assorted correspondence, and a computer that Crowley thought was possibly older than him and which was used solely, as far as he could tell, to do the taxes. Nevertheless, as they’d been planning the flat it had become apparent that, just as Crowley wanted to take over the former drawing room as his study, Aziraphale had his eye on what had once been dining room. There was plenty of space, after all—they hardly needed multiple sitting rooms, nor the rooms for the servants that had become the new dining room.

There had been a clear understanding from the beginning that Crowley was to be the arbiter of all things design-related in their new home. For the most part this had been observed with a surprising amount of grace on Aziraphale’s part. Crowley’s only failure to carry the day was found in the very first task he’d assigned himself. Aziraphale, on taking possession of the room, had declared that the green walls were going to stay. Crowley had tried reasoning, then wheedling, then every other wile he could come up with.

As a last ditch effort he’d informed Aziraphale that green was a traditional color to paint studies in America, as it was thought that the color would attract money. That had succeeded in making the angel wrinkle his nose distastefully, but even that hadn’t been sufficient to change his mind.

“I quite like it,” he’d insisted steadfastly. “It’s unexpected. I’ve always liked a bit of color on the walls.”

The only saving grace, so far as Crowley was concerned, was that the heavy wood bookshelves that lined the walls had, predictably enough, proliferated sufficiently that for the most part only slivers of green showed between them. In most ways the study was an outpost of the bookshop. Every book in the building was treasured by Aziraphale, but there was no denying that some were particularly precious. Most of those had, over the past few years, migrated to the greater privacy of the upstairs study, where they were guaranteed to be safe from any nefarious attempts to purchase them. Like the shop, the books were arranged in a chaotic assortment that made sense only to Aziraphale, with three exceptions. One shelf held the collection of Bibles and first-edition Wildes, jammed together into an uneasy coexistence. Another held volumes of prophecy.

It was here that Aziraphale turned the moment that he entered the study. By the time Crowley had returned bearing cocoa in one hand and coffee in the other, the angel had settled himself at the desk, already surrounded by piles of books that rivaled the ones the previous week’s panic. He barely even glanced up when Crowley came in, just giving an absent nod of thanks as he carefully set the mug of cocoa down at his elbow.

Crowley didn’t take offense—the was what he’d wanted, after all—but just settled into the armchair in the corner, carefully placed to be close enough to feel companionable but not crowding, frowning faintly. Aziraphale might be convinced that the answers to all of this lay in his library, but it was hardly the only source of theories about the end of the world. Resolutely, with only a little bit of trepidation, he fetched out his phone and contemplated search terms.

It was a good deal of time later—he couldn’t tell how much—when a quiet voice and a gentle touch on his elbow brought him back to the present, the room around slowly coming into focus as he blinked blurry eyes.

“—still doing up?” a voice was asking. Crowley looked down and saw Aziraphale, crouched next to the chair and looking up at him with a faint frown. “I thought you’d gone to bed ages ago.”

“Hmmm?” he said, a bit blearily. “Oh. Angel. I was doing some research.”

Aziraphale leveled a distinctly dubious look at his phone. “Really,” he said, in a tone that made it clear that he thought Crowley had been sitting there for hours playing Farmville*.

*On the rare occasions that the angel managed to drag his mind into the current decade, it was always at least five or eight years behind.

“I was!” Crowley said indignantly. “Not everything is in books, you know. Lots of people on the internet have things to say about Armageddon.” Too many, really—hours of reading, and he’d barely made it through a few of the densely written pages of theories. Crazy, he would have called them, a couple of weeks ago before an Archangel showed up and told him the world was ending. Now the main trouble was figuring out which ones were onto something and which ones were just, well, crazy.

Aziraphale wrinkled his nose. “I’m sure they do,” he said, and then, in a clear effort to be charitable, “Anything of particular interest?”

Crowley considered which, if any, of his recent reading might impress the angel. “The American political situation seems to have a surprising amount to do with it,” he said eventually. “And the EU. If they’re right about that, then as soon as Brexit hits we’re probably safe from having the Antichrist in Britain, at least.”

Aziraphale looked at him, rather unreasonably, as if he weren’t making much sense. “I’d always assumed the EU was one of Heaven’s. Seems like their style. Not sure either side would want to responsibility for America right now, though.”

“I’m still trying to figure out why it didn’t end in 2012,” Crowley admitted, trying to stifle a yawn. Aziraphale’s eyebrows pinched, not taken in. “People seem awfully sure about it.”

“I think it was pretty safe,” Aziraphale said absently, pinching the edge of Crowley’s phone and trying to delicately tug it out of his grasp. Crowley’s fingers tightened reflexively and Aziraphale relented, settling his hand back on the arm of the chair. “Doesn’t rhyme with much.”

Crowley frowned, clenching his jaw as it tried to turn into another yawn. “Hmph?”

Aziraphale shook his head, dismissing the point. His eyes never showed the kind of redness that Crowley suspected his own did, but he looked tired in his own way, lacking the brightness and sparkle that he so often had. “Off to bed with you, my dear,” he said gently, making another bid for the phone. This time he succeeded in lifting gently out of Crowley’s hand before he could react, sliding it into his own pocket. “The internet will still be there in the morning.”

“So’ll your books,” Crowley slurred, using his now free hand to grip Aziraphale’s sleeve in a blatantly possessive gesture.

“I suppose they will,” Aziraphale said, gently prying his hand off, but only so that he could hold it in his own. He didn’t seem inclined to let go, so Crowley allowed the gesture. “I had planned to keep reading, though.”

He didn’t sound particularly determined, and Crowley pressed his advantage. “Come to bed,” he said. “You can bring a book, if you want.”

Aziraphale smiled and allowed himself to be pulled to his feet. He paused for a moment by the desk to grab two books, apparently chosen at random, and then let Crowley tug him down the hallway to the bedroom. Crowley didn’t even register the reading light, fast asleep before Aziraphale had even turned the first page.

**

The angel was unusually merciful the next morning. Crowley knew from the first glance that he’d come up with something—Aziraphale was hardly subtle when he had a new idea—but he managed to restrain himself through most of Crowley’s first cup of coffee, an unprecedented show of discipline.

Finally Crowley took pity. “What is it, angel?”

Aziraphale didn’t pretend confusion. “I think I’ve figured out our next step.”

Crowley, still involved with the last few sips of his coffee, managed an inquiring hum.

“It started with your idea in the first place,” Aziraphale said. “You said that it would be Good to thwart the Antichrist. And, you know, I think you might have been on to something!”

The excitement was audible in his voice, and Crowley found himself smiling despite the annoyance that accompanied the memory. “You should listen to me more often,” he drawled.

“Hush, you,” Aziraphale said, frowning at the bark of laughter from Crowley at that. “I’m trying to explain. The Antichrist is, as you said, of Hell. The prophecies are quite clear—if he comes into his powers, there’s very little anyone can do to stop matters from, well, proceeding.”

Crowley frowned, following that. “So we have to stop him from doing whatever causes that?”

Aziraphale nodded. “Precisely. Unfortunately, as I understand it, all he has to do is grow up. But, you know, there are people who could stop it. I’m quite sure of it. He is of Hell, after all. Heaven’s main job is to thwart the wiles of Satan!”

Unbelievable. Crowley stared at the angel in disbelief. “Your plan is to ask Heaven to stop it?”

Aziraphale bounced on his heels, apparently missing the tone. “Precisely!”

Crowley set down his empty mug with a completely unnecessary noise. That, finally, seemed to get Aziraphale’s attention, his pleased expression fading as he took in Crowley’s face. “In case you’ve forgotten, angel, the local spokesman for Heaven was the one who showed up to tell us that all this was kicking off. Why do you think any of them would do anything about it?”

“Ah, yes,” Aziraphale said, undaunted even in the face of unexpected opposition. “Yes, well. I don’t think that they _can _do anything. Yet. Hell will have protected him, you know. Hidden him. Kept everything very secret. Heaven can’t intervene if they don’t know _where _the Antichrist is.”

It made. . . more sense than the argument originally had, although Crowley didn’t find that he was perfectly convinced. But Aziraphale had only just agreed to try doing anything at all. It probably wasn’t the time to pick a fight about the details of the strategy. “Ok,” he conceded. “So what do we do?”

“Find him!” Aziraphale said, bouncing again and looking deeply satisfied. “We are, after all, familiar with Earth in a way that most Heavenly agents aren’t. If we set our minds to it, I’m quite sure we can make some progress.”

It sounded suspiciously like the sort of quest that had appeared in the video games Crowley had played as a teenager. But it wasn’t like he had any better ideas. “Ok,” he said again. “How? Back to the books?”

Aziraphale shook his head. “I’m afraid I’ve rather wrung them dry, for now,” he admitted. “No one foretold the details of the Antichrist’s early life. Not in any useful way, at least. I’m afraid we may have to engage in a some investigative work of our own.”

Crowley, who had abruptly realized that he was going to be quite late for work, hadn’t pressed for further details, just agreeing to meet Aziraphale in Westminster that evening.

The moment Aziraphale had finished divulging the details of his plan, he regretted his discretion.

“An angel?” he demanded, seizing Aziraphale’s elbow, halting his determined stride down the sidewalk away from where he’d parked the Bentley. “Another damn angel?”

Aziraphale frowned. “Now, my dear—”

“You said they didn’t know where the Antichrist was, that was why they hadn’t done anything!” A startled look from a passerby reminded him to moderate his voice, and he hissed the second half of the statement. “Make up your mind.”

Aziraphale looked offended. “They don’t. Not properly, I’m sure, or they’d already have done something about it. But they do keep fairly close tabs on Hell’s agents on Earth. It’s entirely possible that the local angel knows something without realizing it. With careful questioning, we ought to be able to put it together.”

Crowley made a discontented noise but let go of Aziraphale’s arm, letting him resume his progress down the sidewalk. “And so who are we going to meet, exactly?”

“The local Principality,” Aziraphale said, serenely ignoring the inevitable face that the name earned. “I’m not quite sure who’s been posted to this region just at present, but there are only so many options, after all.”

Crowley digested that. “So how did you know to go here?”

Aziraphale made a vague gesture that explained absolutely nothing. Some kind of general affinity, Crowley supposed. “It’s always convenient to be near the center of government,” he said, which wasn’t much more illuminating. “Westminster was fairly obvious, once I’d thought about it.”

It was rather a contrast to Soho, Crowley couldn’t help but think. He was about to voice this thought out loud, despite the probable irritation it would provoke, when he was interrupted by Aziraphale putting out a hand, slowing them as he nodded to a figure on the sidewalk ahead. “There we are,” he said softly. He straightened himself, twitching his bowtie into an even more perfect alignment and tugging his waistcoat into place before striding forward, pulling Crowley in his wake.

“Rahaliel,” Aziraphale said, as the figure turned to look at them.

“Aziraphale,” she said, clearly surprised and trying not to show it. She was tall—taller than either Aziraphale or Crowley—with stick-straight dark hair cut into a rather severely asymmetric bob. Her clothing, while not as anachronistic as Aziraphale’s, could hardly have been called inconspicuous. She wore a crisp skirt suit, perfectly tailored and flattering in a non-specific way. Every scrap of it was a starkly, blindingly white.

A tiny pinch formed in her brow as she looked Aziraphale up and down. “It’s been quite some time,” she said. There was no warmth in her voice, just a simple statement of fact, shaded, perhaps, with a hint of disapproval.

“Yes, well,” Aziraphale said, and then seemed uncertain of how to finish it. “There was just a small matter of business I was hoping we could discuss.”

“Do we still have business in common?” Her eyes flicked over him again, unimpressed, and then pointedly turned to Crowley. “And you brought company.”

“My fiancé,” Aziraphale said, and it was clear that he still felt as much pleasure in the term as Crowley did. “Anthony Crowley.”

The angel did a literal double-take, turning to stare at Crowley again. “Him?” she asked, and if there had been distaste in Gabriel’s voice at the news, there was outright disgust in hers. “A human?”

“Look, I don’t have to take that from you,” Crowley started, but Aziraphale’s hand, tightening on his elbow, silenced him.

“Ah, well,” Aziraphale said reasonably. “I don’t need to take up much of your time—"

“It’s typical, I supposed,” she said. “We all knew you were too fond of _them_. But none of us guessed you'd let yourself down to that level.”

Aziraphale’s lips tightened, and annoyance flashed in his eyes. He repressed it quickly, though, offering the other angel a small and insincere smile. “Come now, my dear.” Rahaliel frowned at the endearment, looking more surprised than offended. “We’re, well, more or less guests here, on Earth. There’s no need to be rude.”

“You’d think you think they own the place, the way you’re talking.”

Aziraphale’s little chuckle was even more fake than his smile had been. “Well, it was made for them in the first place. So perhaps they do, in a way.”

Her face wrinkled again. The expression did little to mar her chilly beauty, although Crowley found himself unmoved by it. “I know you’re particularly fond of them,” she said in the tone that one might use for someone who kept pet rats, “But even you can’t overestimate their abilities that much. We’ve been sent to guide them for a _reason_, Aziraphale. They simply can’t manage on their own, you know that.”

Aziraphale smile was growing ever stiffer. “I suppose we must have rather different views on the matter. I’ve been rather impressed with human ingenuity, you know.”

“Come now. They spread disease.”

“What?” Aziraphale was staring outright. “No, they—you can’t get sick from humans, didn’t they tell you—”

She looked horrified. “Of course _I’m _not affected by such things! But they do, Aziraphale, I’ve seen it, you must have too. One of them gets it and then everyone around them dies too.”

“That’s not—that’s not their fault,” Aziraphale said, a little desperately. “You can’t blame them for being how the Almighty made them.”

“They’re not like Her,” Rahaliel said with absolute conviction. “They invented sin.”

Aziraphale’s lips firmed. “That’s not precisely how I remember it,” he said, his voice edging out of the placatory tones he’d been using so far into something rather more obstinate. “And I was, in fact, there.”

As entertaining as this was, it did seem like it could go on for rather a while. Crowley reached for Aziraphale’s arm, squeezing gently when he made contact. “Angel,” he said quietly. “You wanted to ask—”

“Right,” Aziraphale said, turning his attention back to Rahaliel, doggedly ignoring the look she was giving them at the interaction. “I’m, well, rather concerned about them at the moment,” he said, in what had to be the top in an impressive list of understatements that Crowley had heard him make. 

“Indeed.”

He tried another smile. “It seems that the humans are in a spot of trouble. I thought that together we might be able to help them out.”

She eyed him impassively. “Why?”

“You’ve been here for nine hundred years!” Aziraphale said, imploringly. “There has to be something about Earth that you think is worth saving. What do you like, down here?”

Literal-mindedness must be baked into angels right along with obedience, Crowley thought, as she stopped to think about the question.

“Those stores,” she said finally. “The ones with the computers and phones. The white ones.”

“Your favorite thing on Earth is Apple stores?” Crowley asked. He probably couldn’t have kept the incredulous tone out of his voice, but he didn’t even really try.

Rahaliel barely flicked a glance at him, as if the very sight of a human pained her. “I go there sometimes. At night, when all the humans are sleeping.”

Crowley took a breath to say something inevitably sarcastic, but Aziraphale’s hand on his arm stopped him. His expression had shifted to evident sympathy. “You miss Heaven.”

That earned him only a scornful look. “Of course I do. How do you not?”

“We’re Principalities, you know,” Aziraphale said mildly. “Created, in fact, to guide the peoples and nations of Earth.”

Rahaliel glared at him. “_I’m _a Principality. You abandoned those duties over a thousand years ago.”

Aziraphale stilled completely, the hand that was resting on Crowley’s arm suddenly feeling stiff and foreign. “Ah, yes. I can see why it would look like that. But there were reasons—”

“You can’t pretend to have any moral authority,” she continued, ignoring him completely. “You probably don’t even remember what Heaven is like. But I do. There’s _nothing _on Earth that’s anything like it.”

Aziraphale smiled stiffly. “Yes, well. I do remember well enough to be sure of that.”

“I’ll do my duties down here. I haven’t forgotten them,” she said, the words _unlike you _unvoiced but not unheard. “We’ve had to for six thousand years, after all. But when it’s all done, I am going to go _home._”

Crowley couldn’t imagine that the conversation was going to get any more promising from here. Any more, and there was a risk that she’d figure out what they were up to. Crowley didn’t know what would happen in Gabriel figured out that Aziraphale, rather than reporting for duty, was planning on outright mutiny, but he didn’t think that it could be good. He tugged at Aziraphale’s arm, trying to pull his attention back to him to suggest that they go, but before he could speak he was distracted by rapid movement in the corner of his eye, turning to see what was going on.

It took barely two seconds—a child running alongside her mother and then dancing away, off the sidewalk and onto the street—a car coming too fast, the driver on their phone—Aziraphale looking at Rahaliel, waiting an infinitesimal moment in which nothing happened, nothing happened—and then the car brushed past the child, a scarce and miraculous extra inch of space between them, and the mother had reached her and had grabbed her up and was sobbing into her hair.

Crowley let out a breath that he hadn’t even had to hold, the whole thing had been so fast, and looked around at the angels. Rahaliel was, to all appearances, unconcerned by the entire thing. Aziraphale, on the other hand, had the furrowed brows and tight lips that were closest he ever got to overt outrage.

“What was that?” he asked. He sounded completely taken aback, shocked in a way that Crowley wasn’t used to hearing.

Rahaliel looked back at him with a cool expression. “An unauthorized and unwarranted intervention, apparently.”

It hadn’t been Rahaliel who had performed the miracle, Crowley realized belatedly. It was Aziraphale, who wasn’t even supposed to wield the power of Heaven, who had saved the girl.

“You were just going to let her—” Aziraphale’s face was pale, his eyes wide in shock. “With her poor mother standing right there? Is that—that is, do you really think that’s the best way of doing your duty?”

“Her soul was in a state of grace,” Rahaliel said, unconcerned. “She would been one of ours anyway.”

“One of—one of ours?” Aziraphale demanded. “She’s a child!”

“A child who would have been counted as among our numbers. It makes little difference if you save her life today.” Rahaliel frowned faintly. “Except that now she has time to take another path. There’s a chance we may lose her entirely, you know.”

“Lose her—” Aziraphale sputtered incredulously.

“She likely has quite a few more decades of life now, in which she may be tempted to all kinds of evil,” Rahaliel said in reasonable tones. “And her death would have driven her mother into a life of service and atonement. A pity, really. But I suppose you’ve spent enough time among the humans that it’s natural that you should start to think like them.” The distaste was audible in her voice again.

Aziraphale just stared at her, speechless. As it became clear that he wasn’t going to respond she straightened again, face sliding into a professional expression. “But there was a matter of business that you wanted to discuss?”

“Was there?” Aziraphale asked. “I’m afraid I’ve quite forgotten what it could have been. Oh, and there’s the time—I think we had better be going.”

“As you like,” Rahaliel said, not seeming inclined to press them to stay. Crowley offered her the most insincere smile he could muster, not even bothering to hide his enjoyment of her look of revulsion at being noticed by him, and slipped his arm around Aziraphale’s waist to gently guide him away.

“I’m sorry that had to be your first encounter with my brethren, my dear,” Aziraphale said as they walked back down the street.

“Not my first, angel,” Crowley replied. “You forget about Gabriel.”

Aziraphale laughed humorlessly. “Right, of course. He made a much superior first impression, I’m sure.”

Crowley smiled drily. “I think possibly they made an even worse impression on me than I did on them, which I think is frankly impressive.”

“You were very restrained, dear,” Aziraphale said, glancing at him, a faint twinkle back in his eye. “I’m sure if you’d been really trying you could have appalled them properly.”

Crowley shrugged, unconcerned. “They didn’t really seem worth it, to be honest. There’s no finesse in putting off someone who was determined to dislike you from the start.”

Aziraphale’s lips twitched. “Saving your talents for the really deserving cases like my barber, are you?”

Crowley smirked at the memory. “He had it coming.” He’d been overcharging outrageously, taking shameless advantage of his unworldly client. Crowley had never bothered pointing out that element of the whole situation, not when accusing him of smiling in an overly friendly manner would explain Crowley’s instant dislike perfectly well. The flirting had, indeed, been the cherry on top that had convinced Crowley to make a special effort to run the fellow off, so it hadn’t even been stretching the truth much to let Aziraphale think it was the whole of the story.

Aziraphale hummed severely, and they took a few more steps in silence.

“You’re upset,” Crowley said unnecessarily. To someone who didn’t know Aziraphale well, he would probably appear no more than mildly put out; to Crowley, though, who knew his usual mannerisms well, he was clearly still furious, despite his flash of humor.

Aziraphale gave a little half shrug that said clearly that he was, but didn’t think talking about it would do much good. Crowley wasn’t feeling particularly even-keeled himself—he didn’t think of himself as an idealist, but an angel who wouldn’t save a child’s life was not exactly what he’d been expecting today—and felt rather that someone should talk about their feelings, but didn’t particularly want it to be him.

Crowley tried to pick his words carefully “You’re not much like the rest of them. It makes sense, really—” he wasn’t sure how to finish the sentence, but Aziraphale was looking at him expectantly. He shrugged. “I can see why you left. You can’t have fit in very well, before.”

Crowley’s own angel didn’t disagree. “I don’t suppose I did. I didn’t expect—that is, I know that there are some differences in, er, setting priorities, as it were. Still, I’d never imagined—” He stopped, apparently trying to collect his thoughts. “I want to say that she isn’t a very good angel,” he added after a minute. “But I’m starting to suspect that that’s me, instead.”

“Depends on your definition of good, I suppose.” Crowley shrugged and finally let himself reach for Aziraphale’s hand, tucking into his elbow. “I can tell you that if you asked any of the humans here, they’d all agree on who did the right thing today.”

That earned him, finally, a true smile. He couldn’t help himself, stopping in his tracks and pulling Aziraphale to him. Despite his general dislike of PDA the angel offered no objections, leaning forward into the kiss as eagerly as Crowley himself. In what had to be another angelic another miracle, none of the passersby so much as bumped into them before Crowley had finally pulled back. “You’re the only angel for me,” he murmured.

Aziraphale raised his eyebrows, apparently unimpressed by the admittedly rather cheesy line. “You’re quite sure of that?” he asked. “You could go back and chat up Rahaliel, I think you’d have a real chance—”

“Shut up,” Crowley drawled, drawing Aziraphale back to him for another brief kiss to make sure the order was obeyed.

Aziraphale draw his hand back to his elbow as they turned to make their way back to the car. “At any rate, I hardly think that we can call that a rousing success. We’re no closer to finding the Antichrist.”

Crowley couldn’t argue. “So what’s next, angel?”

Aziraphale made a face like he knew the answer but didn’t want to admit it. “Well. There are others who must know where he is.”

“Others? More angels, you mean?” Crowley’s voice was dubious; he wasn’t sure why Aziraphale would expect to have more luck with them than the ones they’d tried so far.

Aziraphale’s frown deepened. “Rather the reverse, I’m afraid. I think perhaps we need to track down a demon.”

**

Finding a member of the opposite team, as it were, was apparently going to be more challenging than locating Rahaliel had been. Aziraphale’s explanations rapidly descended into the metaphysical and abstruse, with a generous helping of Latin, Hebrew, and what Crowley thought was probably Sanskrit on the side; Crowley’s interpretation of the bits that he could understand was that while similar energies were relatively easy to detect, there was an in-built sort of camouflage for the other side. It made sense—if Crowley were a demon, he was pretty sure he wouldn’t want to be a sitting duck for any angel who happened to be wandering past.

Aziraphale would locate a demon eventually, he promised Crowley, if he had to scry every inch of London to do so. He was sure there would be at least one in the city, he said earnestly. Crowley, leaving the conversation with confused images of bowls of water or perhaps crystal balls and a dim impression that nobody should live in London, was only too happy to avoid learning the details by assuring Aziraphale assiduously that he trusted him to do so.

Crowley himself went back to work. Every day since the announcement of the imminent end of the world it had felt more surreal to fight through the morning commute—and didn’t these people know that they should be cherishing the fleeting natures of life and mortality and getting the hell out of his way—to sit restlessly at his desk and design buildings that would never be built, if he and Aziraphale didn’t succeed. And yet he still went every day and sat there, scheming about passive solar and approving landscape designs for a Zen garden that he privately thought might be, if it came to that, the only casualty of Armageddon who would unquestionably deserve it.

At least one of them was able to do the real work.

When he returned that evening, though, it wasn’t to see Aziraphale crouched over the large mirror that had appeared on his desk. Instead he was standing next to it vigorously polishing something golden that Crowley couldn’t see clearly. The mirror was half-covered with a folded pile of cream and pale tartan fabric that Crowley had never seen before, and a pair of gleaming white boots sat on the floor near his feet.

Crowley leaned against the doorframe, regarding the scene. He must have made a sound, because Aziraphale turned, looking at him. Crowley raised an eyebrow in inquiry, enjoying the slight blush that climbed the angel’s cheeks.

“Just, er,” Aziraphale said. “Dusting off the old uniform, as it were. If it comes to that, which of course it won’t, but there’s no harm in being prepared—”

“To fight?” Crowley said, disentangling that. “You’re getting ready to fight? On _Heaven’s side_?”

“Only if there’s no other option,” he said primly. “It would be a little embarrassing to return without my sword, but I imagine that if it comes to that they’ll just be glad enough to have another soldier.”

“Hang on,” Crowley said. “You can’t seriously be thinking of going back to those bastards.”

Aziraphale frowned at him. “It’s not a matter of principle,” he explained. “But the War isn’t just for show. At the end of the day, either Heaven or Hell will prevail. And it’s quite a bit better for all concerned if Hell isn’t the one who carries the day.”

“Urgh,” Crowley said. He admitted, the image conjured up by that wasn’t particularly nice. “But you never wanted to be a soldier.”

Aziraphale looked up from where he was fidgeting with what Crowley abruptly realized were a pair of wing-shaped insignia pins. “That was before I had something to fight for,” he said matter of factly. The breath left Crowley’s chest all at once, and Aziraphale smiled his small, slightly sad smile. “I may not agree with everything Heaven does, but I can’t deny that they treat human souls a good sight better than Hell does. If it does come to that, I wouldn’t be able to just hang back from this one and not do my bit.”

The diffuse energy that had been roiling through Crowley all day abruptly focused. He surged forward, bearing Aziraphale backwards and pinning him carefully against the blasted green silk of the wall. Aziraphale stared back at him, eyes wide and lips faintly parted. He shifted against Crowley’s hands, just enough to feel them press and flex against his skin, but made no real effort to get away.

Crowley waited just long enough for him to offer a protest that didn’t come and then dived forward, pressing his whole body against him as he took his mouth in a kiss. Aziraphale responded enthusiastically, lips parting as he tried to press back against Crowley, only to find that there was nowhere to go.

Crowley eventually broke the kiss, leaning forward to press his lips to the corner of Aziraphale’s jaw and then, as he tipped his head invitingly to the side, moved down the line of his neck, nudging his collar to the side as he went.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale gasped as Crowley ran out of bared skin and let go of one shoulder to start working on the buttons of his shirt.

“Show me,” Crowley murmured against his skin.

“Mmm? Oh, do that—”

Crowley obliged for a moment, lips and tongue moving against the hollow of Aziraphale’s neck, enjoying the shiver and quiet gasp that his efforts earned. “You,” he said, backing off just enough to be able to speak, letting his breath ghost over the spot that he’d just been paying attention to. “If you’re going to be a Heavenly warrior, I want to see it. You in—” Aziraphale’s freed hand had been wandering slowly down Crowley’s side and back as he spoke, squeezing appreciatively when he reached his destination. Crowley’s breath hitched, his hips pressing forward against Aziraphale’s, but he refused to let himself get distracted from his point. “Rays of glory, or whatever,” he finished, only a little breathless.

Aziraphale tried to pull back to look at him, but couldn’t do more than tip his head back slightly, the ridiculous glasses he was so inexplicably fond of sliding precariously down his nose. He’d gone slightly cross-eyed, trying to focus on Crowley from such a close distance. He looked the furthest thing imaginable from a soldier. “Really?” he asked, sounding uncertain.

“Please,” Crowley breathed.

“You could barely keep your feet the last time I—”

“That’s fine,” Crowley gasped, images flashing through his head. “No problem. Neither of us has to, really.”

Aziraphale groaned at that, the noise pleasantly loud right next to his ear. “Oh, Crowley—”

“C’mon, angel,” Crowley said coaxingly. “Not fair for all the wankers up there to get to see it and not me. They won’t even appreciate it properly.”

Aziraphale huffed a laugh, his whole body doing a little wiggle that shorted out most of Crowley’s remaining brain functions. He tipped his own head forward so that his lips were brushing Crowley’s temple, the only part that he could reach. “You’ll have to let me out, if you want me to manifest the wings,” he said, sounding far too reasonable. Crowley nipped at his neck in retaliation, getting distracted for a minute in chasing the noises that Aziraphale made, but after a moment he forced himself to step away. Aziraphale followed instinctively, making a quietly unhappy noise before catching himself.

Crowley smirked, reaching out and pulling the reading glasses carefully off of his face to set them on the nearest bookshelf. Aziraphale glared at him, hands automatically going to adjust his bowtie, reaching up to find it missing. His hands drifted, aimless, before settling for tugging gently on his waistcoat. He shifted his weight, rolling his shoulders and then, with no more warning and no fuss, his wings were unfolding, and unfolding, and _unfolding_. Even without stretching they spread nearly the full the width of the study, the tips of the feathers brushing the floor.

Along with the wings came golden light spilling out from around Aziraphale’s head, casting a glow that made the light from the incandescent bulbs look cheap and flat. He was reining it in, Crowley thought in some distant, still-rational corner of his mind, not letting it reach the blinding intensity it had had the first, and last, time that Crowley had seen it before. The rest of Crowley’s brain was simply focused on staying upright. It was not helped, he thought vaguely, by the strong distractions coming from other parts of his anatomy.

Even diminished from the last time that he’d deliberately made a similar display, the sense of power rolling off of Aziraphale was heady, almost palpable. Crowley could feel throbbing in his bones, turning his insides to molten lead. He braced himself against it, refusing to look away. Aziraphale held out a hand, palm up. “Do not be—” he started, and Crowley’s ability to move abruptly returned to him. He lurched forward, Aziraphale catching him by his elbows as he crashed into him, gracelessly pressing in for a kiss that rapidly deepened into something messy and a little bit desperate.

“Not afraid,” he gasped, still close enough that they were breathing the same air. “Couldn’t be—”

The power coming from Aziraphale surged, and Crowley felt his entire body pulse with it. “Crowley—” His voice broke on the name, but the fire in his eyes spoke for itself.

“I love you,” Crowley found himself saying. “Angel, I—I—fuck. You’re amazing. I—you—”

Aziraphale cut off his stuttering words by pulling him back in for another heated kiss. “I love you too,” he said. “And nothing is going to keep us apart.” His voice was utterly implacable, and Crowley couldn’t help the shudder that worked through his body, heat pooling deep in the pit of his stomach. Aziraphale felt it—he couldn’t not, with the way that Crowley was pressed against him. He pulled Crowley closer for a moment, indulging in one long, hot grind against his hip, his own thigh just out of reach of Crowley’s aborted attempt to return the gesture.

Crowley made a thoroughly undignified noise of frustration. Aziraphale looked down at him, lips twitching in the small smile that was his equivalent of a smirk. He made a vague gesture and Crowley was abruptly completely naked. It took a moment for him to process the sudden chill across his back, the feel of the fine wool of Aziraphale’s coat and the velvet of his waistcoat instead of his own shirt before he realized what the angel had done.

Without thinking he pushed forward, pressing Aziraphale backwards until he hit the wall again. The thump he made meeting it was muffled by feathers this time, his wings flattened out against the wall behind him. Crowley pressed up against him, making hungry noises in the back of his throat. Aziraphale, despite a brave attempt to remain cool, was starting to look a little wild around the eyes too.

“All the powers of Heaven, and that’s the best use of a miracle that you can think of?” Crowley asked, letting a hint of a growl enter his voice.

Aziraphale gave a considering look down at as much of Crowley’s body as he could see, delicately wetted his lips with the tip of his tongue and said, very deliberately, “Yes.”

Crowley couldn’t help the noise he made at that. He pressed, impossibly, even closer to Aziraphale, pinning his hips to the wall with his own. One of them, he wasn’t sure which, shifted against the other, and there was a moment of almost unbearably pleasurable friction. His naked cock was pressed up against Aziraphale’s lovingly preserved antique trousers, he realized, and the thought alone was enough to have him twitching his hips forward again, chasing the sensation. Aziraphale made an indistinct noise of encouragement and pleasure, and Crowley let himself repeat the motion again, and once more, before forcing himself to still. He’d had other plans, after all.

Pulling back just far enough to be able to watch Aziraphale’s face, Crowley left one hand fisted in the lapel of the coat that the angel was, ridiculously, still wearing. The other drifted up to hover, uncertainly, over Aziraphale’s wing. The angel, glancing over out of the corner of his eye, nodded permission. Crowley didn’t waste any time, letting his hand close the scant distance, smoothing it along the gleaming feathers almost too lightly to feel the texture of them against this palm.

“It’s fine,” Aziraphale said, trying unsuccessfully to focus on Crowley’s face, which was almost nose-to-nose with his. “You can—”

Crowley didn’t wait for more reassurances, burying his fingers in the small feathers along the top of the wing, combing through them. They were just as impossibly soft as he’d always imagined they would be, even as he pressed his fingers in firmly enough to feel the shape of the bone underneath. Aziraphale arched forward at the touch, and Crowley could feel the muscles flex as he fought to get closer.

“Yeah?” Crowley breathed, rubbing his fingers back under the feathers, enjoying the hitch in Aziraphale’s breathing that the gesture earned. “Sensitive, are they?”

“No more than any other limb,” Aziraphale said, pleasingly breathless. “Not that that means much when it’s you, my dear.”

Crowley laughed at that, still smiling as he kissed Aziraphale, again and again. He let his fingers trace the paths that they’d wanted to ever since the first time he’d seen his wings so many years ago. Aziraphale made a pleased noise in the back of his throat and arched up into the touch.

He’d never get tired of the feel of those feathers beneath his hands, he thought, nor of the noises that Aziraphale was making almost continuously now. “You’re amazing,” he breathed. “I can’t believe—you, like this—so beautiful, angel—"

“It’s just superficial, really,” Aziraphale said, sounding entirely too coherent. “A very decorative veneer of power.”

Crowley shook his head. “’s not the wings, angel. You could do this to me any time.” That earned him another kiss, deep and hungry. “Not that I’d object if you wanted to, you know, show off a little bit of that veneer now. Decorative or not.”

Aziraphale raised an eyebrow at him—a move he’d stolen from Crowley, that was—and then the muscles under his hands flexed. Crowley had known, of course, that Aziraphale had allowed himself to be pinned against the wall—that was half of the fun of it—but even he was surprised with the ease in which the wings under his hands curved around and forward, mantling around Crowley even as Aziraphale stepped forward, catching Crowley’s elbows to keep him from overbalancing as he was forced gently backwards. The sense of power coming off of Aziraphale flared a little with the movement, and Crowley was rather glad of the strong hands that were now holding him up as his knees threatened to buckle. “Angel,” he breathed, and Aziraphale smiled seraphically down at him.

“Mmm,” he hummed, looking appreciatively down at Crowley. “You’re quite a sight yourself, you know. Quite lovely, and all for me.”

“You’re not—” Crowley said, reaching out to pluck irritably at the buttons of his shirt, most of which were still fastened. “Still far too many clothes.”

“I don’t see why I should have to do all the work around here,” Aziraphale said. Crowley made a disgruntled sound in the back of his throat, but the truth was that with five years of practice he’d become a great deal more efficient at undoing buttons. It didn’t take him long to strip Aziraphale of his waistcoat and shirt. He managed to get his trousers unfastened, Aziraphale obligingly stepping out them, forcing Crowley back another couple of steps as he did so, until the back of his knees unexpected bumped against something soft.

When Crowley glanced back and down he saw that the old armchair had been transformed; one of the arms had disappeared and the whole thing had elongated, making a chaise that looked like it belonged to the original era of the flat. Aziraphale pressed him gently but insistently down against the upholstery that felt, improbably, even more plush than it had been the day they’d bought it. By the time Aziraphale was satisfied he was lounging comfortably, shoulders propped up against the remaining arm, legs haphazardly sprawled down the length of the chaise.

Aziraphale stood there for a long moment, overtly enjoying the view. Crowley let himself be warmed by the regard, angling his hips and arching an eyebrow. “You have a plan here, angel?”

Aziraphale said smiled down at him, warm and a little bit hungry. “Just stay there, I’ll do all the work,”

“You don’t have to—”

“I know,” the angel said dismissively. “But I said I’d take care of you, didn’t I?”

Crowley tried to sit up at that, alarm bells ringing. “I didn’t ask because—I only wanted to see—”

“I know, I know,” Aziraphale said, bending down to steal a heated kiss. By the time he straightened up again, Crowley’s head was spinning and he’d almost forgotten what they’d been discussing. “I want to,” Aziraphale said in a low voice, his own desire evident in his tone. “Please, let me.”

Crowley’s misgivings gave way. “Yes, sure,” he babbled, nodding frantically. “Anything you like, angel.”

Aziraphale smiled down at him, somehow beatific despite being fully nude, his flushed red cock standing proudly in full view. He came over to the new sofa, which somehow found itself wide enough for him to place his knees on either side of Crowley’s hips, kneeling above him.

It took him a few minutes to get himself ready—hands busy elsewhere, and nothing for Crowley except the sight and occasional faint brush he twisted his hips just so. Crowley’s breath was coming in great gasps, hitching every time that Aziraphale made contact against his cock, or his thighs, or anywhere else, really—it was all so sensitive that it hardly seemed to make a difference.

And then the angel had deemed himself ready. There was a moment of rearranging, the inherent awkwardness of getting two bodies into such precise alignment, and then the only things that Crowley was aware of was heat and slick pressure, and the sight of Aziraphale over him.

He looked strong and certain and sure, and Crowley knew that he was all of those things, just as much as he was also indecisive, and anxious, and tentative. His wings were arched protectively above and around them, and everywhere Crowley looked he just saw ranks of white feathers. And among them all, wearing an expression of deep pleasure that rivaled the glow of the halo still falling around him, was the angel himself. Powerful, and undeniably otherworldly, but just as undeniably familiar, and loved, the one who had chosen Crowley and had just kept on choosing.

One who was ready to take up arms just to protect Crowley from some unspecified fate—and that thought alone was enough to push him desperately close to the edge. He reached out clumsily, his hand encountering Aziraphale’s stomach. He slid down it towards the spot where they were joined until he brushed against hot skin that elicited a particularly pleasant sound from Aziraphale. Crowley managed to get his fingers wrapped around him, stroking in time to his movements as he rose up and sank down flush against Crowley’s hips.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale gasped, and it had to be his favorite rendition of his name yet. “If you—I—”

Crowley grinned up at him, sure his own desperation would be showing now too. “Good,” he said. “Go on, for me, angel—”

Aziraphale did something particularly clever with his hips, once, twice, a third time, and that was it. Crowley had just enough presence of mind to let go while his other hand tightened helplessly where it had grasped the angel’s thigh and he was gone, subsumed by white-hot pleasure.

He regained control of his limbs to find Aziraphale still kneeling over him. Crowley made an inarticulate sound and discovered that his hand was resting just below Aziraphale, now being brushed by his knuckles as he took matters into his own hand, rather literally. Crowley gently batted his hand away and took its place, stroking as firmly as he dared. Aziraphale gave an involuntary stuttering thrust against him, making another of his delicious sounds that could, perhaps, have been vowels of Crowley’s name. He didn’t last more than a minute longer, coming with a familiar moan and a flare from his halo that felt like sunshine against Crowley’s skin.

Afterwards, as they lay there together, Crowley’s head pillowed on Aziraphale’s chest, legs entangled, wings hanging off the chaise and sprawling across the floor, some of the angel’s earlier words came back to his mind. “Hang on a minute,” he said. “What did you say about a sword?”

Aziraphale, whose higher brain functions usually took a few more minutes to come back than Crowley’s did, just blinked at him. “Mmm?”

Crowley frowned, trying to remember. “You said earlier that you’d have to go back without your sword. But you have a sword. I’ve seen it.” The first time he’d seen it, Aziraphale had been within a hairsbreadth of wielding it against some humans who’d threatened to, among other things, shoot Crowley. These days it generally lived in the umbrella stand in Aziraphale’s study, along with one black umbrella and one printed with a full-size union jack, still with the tags attached.*

*Aziraphale always glared at the latter, a gift from Crowley for their one-month anniversary, but had never in five years so much as hinted that he wished to get rid of it.

Aziraphale, improbably, turned pink. Crowley studied him, eyebrows raising in delighted speculation. Whatever could make the angel blush while still lying naked together after what they’d just done was bound to be a good one.

“Not that sword,” Aziraphale muttered.

“You have another one?” Crowley asked, eyebrows climbing even higher. “How much weaponry do you have stashed about the place, angel?”

Aziraphale was looking even more embarrassed. “Well, I don’t. Have it stashed anywhere anymore, that is. And Gabriel mentioned it particularly, you know,” he added worriedly.

Crowley gave him a pointed look. “You had another sword?"

“When I was sent down to guard the gate,” Aziraphale explained. “It was all very official. Principality, Guardian of the Eastern Gate, flaming sword, all of that.”

“Someone gave_you _a flaming sword?” Crowley couldn’t stop himself from laughing, and Aziraphale’s wounded look only made it worse. “Angel, I’ve seen you nearly chop off a finger trying to cut up an apple.”

“I was rather good with the sword, I’ll have you know,” Aziraphale said huffily. “They don’t give them out to just anyone. And the flames throw off the balance, it’s not an easy weapon to learn.”

“Were you, now.” Crowley could almost picture it now. If he hadn’t already been lounging in immediately post-coital bliss, the image would have been enough to have him jumping Aziraphale on the instant. “What happened to it, then?”

Aziraphale’s flush returned with a vengeance, and he turned away, muttering something that Crowley couldn’t catch with his face half-buried in the pillow.

“What was that?”

He lifted his head, looking down over his chest to glare at Crowley. “I gave it away. Happy?”

Crowley’s mouth dropped open, eyes wide with delight. “Gave it away? Gave it away to who?”

“The humans, of course,” Aziraphale said, as if it were obvious. “Who else, a demon? But it was cold, and there were wild animals out there outside the garden, and they’d really had a very bad day. There wasn’t much I could do, but I didn’t need the sword, and it could be of real use to them.”

Crowley stared for a moment. “You gave a flaming sword to Adam and Eve?”

“Yes,” Aziraphale said, a trifle petulantly. “And nobody ever mentioned it again, well, hardly, but now Gabriel—”

Aziraphale stopped, eyeing Crowley huffily as he lost the battle to keep his laughter contained. “As I said,” he said stiffly when Crowley’s whoops finally died down. “It would be rather awkward, I’m afraid. I’d rather hoped it simply wouldn’t come up again. Nobody’s mentioned it for a good six thousand years, after all.”

That set Crowley off again. Aziraphale tried to maintain his annoyance, but apparently found it too difficult in the face of Crowley’s mirth, softening into a smile. “I suppose it is a bit ridiculous,” he said, a little sheepishly.

Crowley stopped laughing at that, crawling up Aziraphale’s body to claim a kiss. “It’s the best story I’ve ever heard,” he said after he’d gently pulled away. “The rest of them should be more like you, is all.”

Aziraphale smiled, leaning up for another kiss. “Unfortunately, I don’t think they’d listen to you say so. Which is why I’d better get back to work, I’m afraid.”

Crowley considered arguing—he was warm, and comfortable, and Aziraphale was right there, and just at the moment he had all of the things that really made the world feel worth saving. There didn’t seem to be much point in debating, though. Not verbally, anyway. He let his head fall back against Aziraphale’s chest, pressing his body along his side, and anchored his other hand among the feathers of the wing still spread out underneath them. Aziraphale didn’t even bother with a perfunctory protest, merely spreading one hand across Crowley’s back and letting the other wing come to rest gently over them both, holding them in their own small world of warmth and love. For now, at least, it would be enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was unexpectedly moved to write a more explicit scene, so that happened. As you can probably tell from the number of previous fades-to-black, I don't usually do that. This is actually the only time I've written smut (the first was terrible and will definitely never see the light of day), so let me know what you think! I hope it's not too weird to drop it in after not having anything similar in the series previously.
> 
> This one was also delayed more than I'd hoped--first I managed to injure my hand and couldn't type very well for a few days (it's fine now), and then work's still being crazy busy. I'd promise that the next chapter would be up sooner, but I would probably be lying.


	5. Chapter 5

It was another week before Aziraphale located the demon. Crowley was painfully aware of every hour that flowed by—three months had never seemed like much time, but now that it was half gone in what barely felt like a moment, there were moments when he couldn’t forget how little time would be left to them if they were not, in fact, successful.

Crowley only let this creeping awareness take over in the evenings, when he allowed himself to tempt the angel into abandoning his studies for a few hours to go to one of their favorite restaurants. Aziraphale always caught him in his staring—he hadn’t tried to hide it, not ever and certainly not recently, and _certainly _not now—and his own eyes would dim a little in response to the open desperation in Crowley’s. Then one of the other them would brighten and, by sheer force of will, pull the conversation to happier topics. And once they’d returned home it was easier, usually, to shift to more successful distractions, forgetting the desperate search for an hour or two before Aziraphale resumed his vigil for the night.

One evening, though, Aziraphale was lying in wait to seize Crowley the moment he stepped through the door. One glance, and he knew.

“You found him?”

Aziraphale nodded, eyes alight with pleasure and resolve. “Yes. I’d figured out yesterday the neighborhood that he seems to frequent. This afternoon he’s been still enough that I could pinpoint him with more accuracy. He’s been staying put—I think he may be in a pub.”

Crowley set down his bag and reached out to open the door again, holding it as Aziraphale grabbed his own coat and stepped outside. For once he didn’t complain at all about Crowley’s driving, just hanging on tightly and giving directions as they wound through the streets of London.

Eventually, after more time spent in rush hour traffic than Crowley really cared to repeat any time soon, they found themselves parked on a street that was hardly better than an alley, across from an utterly unprepossessing pub. The building itself was a squat brick edifice grimy with years of pollution; the windows were as dirty as the walls, and the illumination of the sign was on its last legs, dying and flaring back up as they watched.

“Well,” Aziraphale said, his expression of distaste illuminated by the greenish light of the resurrected sign. “I suppose there’s nothing for it.”

Crowley couldn’t argue. “What’s the plan, angel?”

Aziraphale straightened his bow tie, the determined expression making a reappearance. “You can wait here, I think, I should be able to—”

“Nope,” Crowley said, popping the ‘p’. “Came this far, I deserve a drink, at least.”

“Very well,” Aziraphale acquiesced. “Go ahead, then, and I’ll follow a few minutes later. Don’t approach anyone—any of them could be the demon. I’ll talk to him myself, see what I can find out.”

It didn’t seem like much of a plan, but demons, like angels, were much more Aziraphale’s domain than his own. Crowley flipped him a casual salute and sauntered across the street and into the pub. The outside, it turned out, was an accurate advertisement of the comforts that waited within. The general public, it appeared, agreed with their assessment. The place was almost deserted. Crowley skirted around the few customers sitting near the bar, wondering which of them might be the demon, and ordered a drink. One hopefully strong enough to kill anything that might still be living in the dirty glass, and sank into a booth in a corner, positioned so that he could see the door. He didn’t have to wait for more than a minute or two until Aziraphale appeared, stepping through the door and promptly wiping his hand on his pants.

Crowley watched from behind his sunglasses, already distinctly aware of an certain building premonition of inevitable disaster as Aziraphale slid onto the stool next to the demon’s, even though the bar was almost deserted and most of the seats were empty. He signaled the bartender for something—Crowley was disappointed, but not surprised, when it turned out to be his habitual glass of white wine—took a sip of his newly delivered drink, and turned slightly to his companion, a winning smile on his face. “Quite the weather we’re having, isn’t it?”

The demon didn’t even bother to look up from his drink. “Fuck off.”

Aziraphale straightened, offense in every line. “My good ma—that is, I’m sure there’s no call for that sort of—”

This time the demon did turn to look at him. “I said, fuck off. Angel.” His voice was flat and factual. It was clearly neither an endearment nor a joke.

“I—that is—of all things—” Aziraphale blustered, clearly surprised and wrong-footed. “I certainly don’t know what you mean by that—”

“I mean,” the demon growled, rolling his eyes expressively enough that even Crowley could see it from across the room, “That you’re a bloody angel and we both know it. I think the first part was clear enough.”

Aziraphale was frowning now, clearly completely flummoxed by this development. Crowley smothered a groan by taking a too-large gulp of his drink. Half of it went down the wrong way*. When he emerged from his coughing fit, wiping streaming eyes, his hopes that the situation would have improved was immediately dashed.

*He’d asked Aziraphale about that, once, when the angel had blithely stated that the fossil record was a fabrication representing, in Crowley’s opinion, a particularly unamusing joke. If it had all been designed, he personally thought that Someone could have done a considerably better job. Aziraphale had airily declared the matter ineffable and declined to entertain any further questions on the subject.

Aziraphale, who could usually muster something at least resembling a poker face when he really had to, was still staring at the demon in classic deer-in-headlights fashion. The demon was apparently still enumerating tells. “—bloody beige suit. And you didn’t even manage to get the hair right on the corporation,” he said, gesturing towards Aziraphale’s pale curls. The angel put a hand to his head, looking vaguely offended. “Just couldn’t do without the halo for a few hours, could you? White bloody wine, holy-stick-up-your-ass posture, holier-than-fucking-thou expression, and small talk about the bloody fucking weather. Couldn’t look more like an angel if you tried,” he finished. Crowley couldn’t tell if the offense on Aziraphale’s face came more from the insults, annoyance at the rapidity with which he’d been found out, or the sheer volume of profanity aimed in his direction. Whatever the cause the expression was, even under the circumstances, rather hilarious. “And I don’t know what you fucking think you’re doing here, but this is bloody fucking entrapment and you’d better refer back to my original instructions before I file a complaint.”

Aziraphale laughed, nervously. “My good sir, there’s no need for any antagonism—”

The demon grinned, slowly. “Antagonism? You’ll see fucking _antagonism _when you’re filling out a forty fucking page incident response response. By hand. In triplicate. ‘m not bluffing, angel. Unless you want to be chained to a desk doing paperwork for the next century, _fuck off_.”

“There seems to be a, er, unfortunate misunderstanding,” Aziraphale said, momentarily managing to seize control of the conversation and instantly managing to squander it. “I’m, er, that is, well. Angelic by nature, perhaps, but not presently by occupation. Not at all present in an, as it were, official capacity, I assure you. This is hardly an ‘itchy opposition’.”

Aziraphale had a certain self-satisfied tone when he dropped what he believed to be a clever bit of human slang into a conversation. Crowley, safely out of the demon’s line of sight, was slowly thumping his head on the wall behind him, futilely mouthing “sting operation” to himself. The demon, apparently entirely unable to parse that one, was merely staring at him.

The angel took advantage of the lack of interruption to dig himself in deeper. “I merely wished to have a quick word. I believe that a spot of cooperation at the present moment might save us all quite a headache. If we could just be rational, I think we might turn out to have some interests in common. The continued existence of this particularly charming watering hole, for one—”

The demon, finally, interrupted. “What the bloody fuck are you talking about, angel?” he demanded.

“Aziraphale,” the angel interrupted. “Is my name,” he explained, only slightly sheepishly, as the demon stared at him in blank disbelief. Crowley stopped banging his head against the wall—it wasn’t doing any good and he was giving himself a headache—and finished his drink in a single swallow. He should probably keep his wits about him, now that his fiancé was, apparently, giving out personally identifiable information to a demon, but he honestly couldn’t see what difference it would make.

“Aziraphale,” the demon drawled. “I don’t know what fucking game you’re playing at, _Aziraphale_. But I don’t want anything to do with you fucking Heavenly wankers, capacity unofficial or whatever fucking else. I’m not stupid enough to fall for any of your peace and love bollocks. _Fuck off_.”

His last words were accompanied by a flash of light and a flare of power that even Crowley could feel. Rather than the gentle heat of Aziraphale’s, which felt rather like lounging in a sunbeam, the demon’s was sharper, crueler. The sort of heat that wouldn’t hesitate, should it find an opportunity, to burn.

Aziraphale, belatedly coming to the realization that nothing he could say could possibly salvage the situation, was standing stiffly, clearly fishing for a clever retort on which to end the conversation. Apparently nothing came to mind, because he settled for a stiff nod and a crisp “Good evening,” before stalking out.

He flicked a glance at Crowley as he left, clearly expecting him to follow him out to the car momentarily. Crowley didn’t get to his feet, though. He settle back, lounging across the bench of the booth with deliberate indolence, and waved a hand until he caught the bartender’s attention. “Same again,” he said, in a voice pitched to carry. “And make it a double.”

**

When Crowley emerged, blinking against the late afternoon light, he saw Aziraphale, sitting ramrod straight in the passenger seat of the Bentley. Crowley just caught his gaze flicking away; by the time he reached the car the angel was resolutely staring off in the other direction. He tried the door, found it still locked, and spent another minute fishing the key out of his pocket and letting himself in.

He slid in behind the wheel, letting the silence stretch. It took approximately sixty seconds for Aziraphale to break. He was properly irritated, then—usually he could barely hold out for thirty. “It’s been nearly three hours,” he said, voice about as stiff as his posture. “If I’d known you wanted an evening out, I would have been perfectly happy to accompany you to a more congenial establishment, my dear.”

“_You _would have spoiled the game, angel,” Crowley said. Aziraphale’s shoulders hunched, and for the first time Crowley was sincerely irritated at the demon. Leave it to Hell to try to ruin a perfectly good pet name.

“And what game would that be?” Aziraphale was, as usual, hopeless at hiding his own irritation, no matter how he tried to cloak it in indifference.

Crowley rolled his eyes affectionately. “Finding out where the Antichrist is, you daft excuse for a secret agent.”

The excess tension melted out of Aziraphale’s shoulders, although he didn’t do anything so undignified as slump. “You thought you’d have more luck interrogating an agent of Hell, did you?” His tone was tart, now, and Crowley was happy to hear the confirmation that he had moved on from his real irritation.

“_I _wasn’t made in under thirty seconds,” he said, smirking provocatively at the angel, who he knew would rise to the bait.

Aziraphale sniffed in derision. “You’re a human,” he said repressively. “Of course he didn’t ‘make’ you as an angel.”

Crowley’s smirk threatened to grow into a grin, but he forced it back to something that could, in the dim light, at least resemble cool detachment. “Did better than that. I got the intel. The Antichrist’s name is Warlock Dowling, and he’s the son of the American Ambassador to London.” Aziraphale gaped at him, expression melting from surprise to frank delight. Crowley let his glasses slip down his nose and winked. “So. How about dinner? You fancy the Ritz?”

**

Aziraphale was muttering peevishly as they left the restaurant a couple of hours later. Crowley had meant his earlier suggestion in jest—he’d never quite managed to book a table there, despite all his intentions—but Aziraphale had merely looked at him with a certain amount of determination and insisted that he make good on his word. When they’d arrived the angel had marched confidently in, Crowley in tow, and found that there was, indeed, a table that had just come open. Aziraphale had ignored Crowley’s raised eyebrows—it wasn’t that he was surprised, exactly, that this was what Aziraphale would use miracles on now that nobody was stopping him, but the brazenness of it was still a bit startling—to settle comfortably into his seat and muse over the menu. Once the critical task of ordering for both of them had been taken care of, Aziraphale had finally indulged in all the curiosity that he’d clearly been stifling.

“Now, my dear, you really must tell me everything. What happened? How in Heaven did you get the demon to tell you? Are you sure that—”

“It wasn’t that difficult, angel,” Crowley had said. “You were just trying a bit too hard. Of course he got suspicious when you started acting like his best friend."

Aziraphale sniffed. “Making small talk about the weather is a hallmark of distant acquaintances, not close friends.”

Crowley rolled his eyes. “In a place like that, you might as well have been. Of course he was suspicious. So I just kept on ordering top-shelf stuff until he decided he wanted to know what was going on. Name’s Lazaram, by the way. Pretty sure that has to be the real one, he was pretty far gone by the time he told me, and even he could probably come up with a better human alias.”

Aziraphale’s eyebrows had shot up. “Lazaram?” he murmured. “Must be a new corporation. Still, I’m surprised I didn’t recognize him.”

Crowley raised an eyebrow in return. “Old friend of yours?”

Aziraphale waved a hand dismissively. “We had a run in or two back in the day. Clearly I didn’t make much of an impression—not sure I ever did introduce myself, though, come to think of it. Rather rude, I suppose, but there were generally rather more pressing matters to attend to in the moment. But do get on with it, my dear, I’m dying to hear how you out-smarted him.”

There was so much more that Crowley wanted to know about that, but Aziraphale wasn’t likely to be patient with another digression, and besides he had few defenses against the sincere admiration in the angel’s voice. He preened a little, under those fond eyes. “Well, anyway. He came over, we got to chatting. Told him I was out drinking during the day because I’d just gotten fired. Spent a while abusing my boss, managed to work in that given how stupid he was, probably wouldn’t even realize that I still had all the passwords to the accounts.”

Aziraphale was frowning, evidently puzzled. “Very clever of you to come up with a story so quickly, I’m sure, but why? It hardly seems relevant.”

Crowley grinned. “He’s a demon, right? Supposed to be corrupting souls, I thought. So figured that if I wanted his attention, I’d better look like a pretty good bet.”

“Ah,” Aziraphale said, who generally was clever enough to reason a step or four ahead. “And what sin did he attempt to lure you into?”

“Theft,” Crowley said cheerfully. “Embezzlement. He was already pretty clearly working that angle—didn’t I deserve better, after giving the best years of my life, working every hour of the day with never a raise, never mind that I never said a word of any of that—and then I let slip that it was a charity. Global sort of thing, children in poverty.”

Aziraphale smiled at him, all fond admiration. “Even better, from his point of view, I suppose.”

Crowley smirked. “Nothing’s better—worse, I suppose—than stealing from hungry children, I guess. He was about ready to crawl over the table and have me transfer the money on my phone then and there. I bought the first round, but he took over after that. Didn’t hold back much himself, either.”

That had Aziraphale frowning. “I do adore you, my dear, but I must say that you can’t possibly have been out-drinking a demon. His tolerance level—”

“Oh, yeah, loads higher than mine,” Crowley admitted easily. “But it turns out demons are really lazy. Sloth, I guess I should say. If I was willing to go get the drinks, he wasn’t objecting, and no bartender ever minds serving a gin and tonic without the gin.”

That won him a smile, and he went on. “Eventually, once I could pretend I was pretty drunk, I got on to whining about why were we even trying to children in Africa or wherever when the real problem was the rising population. Too many children anywhere, wasn’t it the natural order of things if some of them got sick anyway, that sort of thing.” Aziraphale was looking reproachful, and Crowley raised his hands in self-defense. “I was talking to a demon! Some of us know how to lie, you know.”

Aziraphale sniffed. “In the long term, the rewards of dissimulation are rarely worth the cost.”

Crowley smirked. “And yet in the, very, very short term, how did honesty work for you?”

Aziraphale ignored the question with aplomb. “I’m afraid, my dear, that I still don’t quite follow _why _you masqueraded as a jaded non-profit employee.”

“Ex-employee,” Crowley corrected. “I thought that maybe if I complained about trips to work with terrible children in various places, he’d let slip something about having been there, or knowing about a kid there or something, and we’d get some clue about where the Antichrist was.”

“Ah,” Aziraphale said, eyes lighting. “So you lured him into revealing details that seemed insignificant in isolation, but all together gave away the game. So to speak. No wonder you were in there for three hours.”

That was how the angel would like the world to work, wasn’t it. But Crowley had to disillusion him. “Nah, it only took so long because I had to get him properly drunk. The first time I started saying something about screaming kids in Guatemala, he said laughed and said that I didn’t have to go so far, I could find the like in London. The kid of the American Ambassador was a real hell spawn, if I knew what he meant. That the parents named him Warlock, and it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Then he laughed about it for so long that a table lamp could have figured out that something was up. Wasn’t actually very hard.”

Aziraphale was watching him with undisguised fondness. “Trust you to out-tempt a creature literally designed for it.”

Crowley basked in his approval and their success, letting some of the accumulated tension of the last weeks seep out of his shoulders as he raised his glass to the angel, holding his eyes as they touched them gently and then drank. It was, he had to admit, one of the nicest dinners they’d had together in quite some time. Maybe there was something to the Ritz, after all.

Aziraphale’s pleasured in both Crowley’s news and his food hadn’t precluded a spate of acerbic criticism of Hell’s handling of the situation. Once they’d finished their desserts (he’d chosen two and split them democratically with Crowley, eating first his own and then stealing bites when Crowley was too slow to finish his portion) and he’d nonchalantly signed off on the check, his muttering had resumed unchecked.

His main grievance seemed to be the tackiness of the entire situation. “The son of the American Ambassador,” he complained as Crowley opened and held the door for him. “As if Armageddon was a cinematographic show one wished to play in as many countries as possible.”

Crowley shrugged a shoulder, sliding out into traffic. “From what I saw this afternoon, angel, I wouldn’t say that Hell has much in the way of taste.”

Aziraphale snorted, a surprisingly undignified noise that Crowley always secretly enjoyed hearing. “They haven’t,” he said decisively. “Neither has Heaven, mind you,” he added, too caught up in his ire to scold Crowley as he ran a light. “One thinks that ‘motivational’ posters are the height of wit and uses door-to-door salesmen as landscaping material, and the other makes those computer stores look like the height of sophistication. The only decent architecture in Heaven is what they stole.”

Crowley had _so many _questions, but it was the final tidbit that really caught his attention. “Mmm?” he inquired, knowing that he didn’t sound as casual as he intended. “Stole? What have they got up there?”

Aziraphale huffed a laugh. “Anything that caught their fancy, I think. Started a few centuries before I left. Manifest a copy or something, make it fifteen percent larger, plop it down any which way outside headquarters. I’m sure they’ve kept at it since. And no,” he added, more severely. “I’m a persona non grata there myself, I can’t take you up to see whatever lost treasures they’ve squirreled away.”

Crowley turned to squint at him as he was forced to stop at a light that was undeniably red and asked, casually, “Are they still up to it, do you think? Any more contemporary pieces?

“I haven’t been up there in centuries, my dear,” Aziraphale said mildly. “I’m sure I really couldn’t say whether they’d picked up any of your buildings."

“I didn’t say that,” Crowley said reflexively. “I just wanted to know whether I had to imagine the Shard in Heaven. Because if so, angel, I hate to spoil your plans, but I’m not sure I can go.”

He glanced to the side to see Aziraphale looking at him fondly. “I do believe they have the Parthenon,” he said. “And the gardens of Babylon, of course. If that helps sweeten the deal."

Crowley pulled into his spot in front of the bookshop, pondering whether the Parthenon as it was in its prime would have been a sufficient inducement to come to the church, had he been offered the choice a decade ago. He walked around to get Aziraphale’s door, enjoying the small, downturned smile that the gesture generally prompted. He followed him to the door, jangling the keys still in his hand, but was surprised to find that Aziraphale had already opened the door. In the four years since he’d first handed a spare key over to Crowley with a faint blush and an entirely unnecessary spate of words justifying the action, Aziraphale had virtually never actually had his keys out before Crowley reached the door and opened it for him. He hardly even pretended to try, anymore.

Aziraphale turned to look back at him, a quizzical frown at the way he’d stopped, and Crowley realized what had happened. The angel hadn’t used a key. He’d just willed the door open.

Crowley had had years to sort out how he felt about his lover being an angel; he hardly knew yet how to respond to this casual use of otherworldly power. There wasn’t time to think about it right now, anyway. If they saved the world, he’d have plenty of time to get used to it, after all.

He shook himself out of his thoughts and followed Aziraphale into the shop. One thing at a time, after all. “So, what’s the plan now, angel? It’s not like we can just pop in and ask the Ambassador’s son to maybe reconsider this whole annihilation-of-the-Earth thing.”

Even the relatively weak joke earned him a smile. “Nothing that hands-on, I’m happy to say. Heaven will take care of it, I’m sure.”

Crowley’s good mood soured slightly at the reminder of Aziraphale’s real plan. “Time to report it in?” Be a good agent, trust management to finish the job. He still didn’t like it.

Aziraphale gave him the half-smile that he seemed to believe successfully covered his feelings about an awkward situation. “I don’t think I’d better go up in person,” he said, eyes on the floor. Crowley’s irritation—at the situation, at the world, at Heaven and all its angels—surged at the careful note in his voice. “Not sure how they’d respond if I just showed up. A letter, I think. For Gabriel. He’ll know how to handle things.”

Crowley was still dubious. “How’ll we know once he does? What if he doesn’t?”

Aziraphale smiled at him, this one sincere. “I’m sure he will. It is unquestionably the right thing to do, thwarting Satan. Gabriel knows that as well as anyone! I feel quite confident leaving it in his hands.”

Crowley, slouching over to the sofa and sprawling across, could only wish that he were too. He pulled out his phone, scrolling through Twitter, as Aziraphale fetched out a blindingly white sheet of paper and carefully began to write. He’d put his faith in _his_angel, for now, he decided. If that meant Heaven by proxy, so be it. 

**

Something was wrong.

It hadn’t taken particularly clever detective work to figure it out. The day had started quietly enough, as had all the days since Aziraphale had written the letter to Heaven and, apparently, washed his hands of Armageddon*. Following a rather pleasant dinner the evening, though, had rapidly degenerated. Crowley was still trying to figure out where it had gone wrong.

*There had been, in fact, about seven of them.

“The midnight blue is striking,” he said, for what felt like the dozenth time. “Especially with the white border and the inserts.”

Invitations, it had turned out, fell in a previously unexplored grey area—they were unquestionably design, which generally would have meant that they were Crowley’s usually undisputed domain, but they were also printed and on paper, which put them dangerously close to Aziraphale’s bailiwick. With the wedding coming quite startlingly fast, now, and several converging deadlines at work, Crowley had ceded his claim with few qualms as soon as Aziraphale had brought the issue up. He was regretting it now.

Aziraphale glanced down at the paper samples in his hands. His face had been stuck in a worried frown since Crowley had stepped through the door, and it showed no sign of getting better. “It’s high contrast,” he agreed. “But I’ve always thought that white text on dark colors was rather, well, unnecessarily dramatic.”

“It’s a wedding invitation, angel,” Crowley said, letting his head fall back over the arm of the sofa. “There’s nothing wrong with a little drama.”

Aziraphale tutted. “There’s no need to go overboard, dearest. And if we use the dark blue, then there’s the problem with the band. White is definitely too bright, but the navy would just blend in. I don’t know, maybe—”

“If you don’t like the midnight, let’s go with the cream,” Crowley said. Again. “It’s traditional, you can’t say it’s too dramatic, and I know you like the letterpress.”

Aziraphale made a non-committal noise. “I don’t know. I do like it, my dear. Quite fond of it, in fact. But cream isn’t really, well, _you_, now is it? It’s fine by me, but you’re always—” he waved a hand in Crowley’s general direction. He couldn’t really argue with the point, inarticulate was it was—cream invitations were not, in fact, _him_. “And I should really like to go with something that speaks to both of us, as a couple.”

Crowley tried not to roll his eyes, although he knew some of his exasperation was creeping into his face. “Angel. They’re wedding invitations. All they need to ‘speak to’ is when, where, and would you like to show up.”

Aziraphale, frown only deepening, stared at the samples again. “Perhaps I ought to go back to the shop,” he said vaguely. “I’m quite sure she didn’t actually show me all the options. I know how you generally feel about color, my dear, but I’m not sure that. . . “

Crowley let the words turn into a vague wash, squinting at Aziraphale as he tried to focus on everything else. He was often indecisive, of course—could sometimes spend quite unconscionable amounts of time debating between two items on a menu, and he’d once taken over forty minutes to decide on which book he wanted to bring to bed—but still. This was different. Aziraphale cared about the wedding, that much had consistently been clear, but up until tonight he hadn’t shown much interest in details that weren’t to do with the catering. Something was up.

Crowley considered subtlety, but honestly, it had been too long a month for that. He just raised his eyebrows and looked at Aziraphale until the angel, clearly aware of his regard, stumbled to a stop.

“Yes?” he asked testily.

Crowley patted the sofa, waiting with ever higher eyebrows until Aziraphale gave in and finally settled, perching on the very edge of the sofa. Crowley gently but firmly pried the poor pieces of paper out of his grip and set them carefully on the table, taking his hands in his own instead. “Angel,” he said, trying to sound soothing enough to calm some of his restless energy. “What, and I say this with love, the fuck is actually going on?”

Aziraphale huffed a breath that was somewhere between laughter and annoyance, probably at the profanity. “Hmmm?” he tried to recover, badly. “Whatever do you mean, dearest?”

Crowley rolled his eyes, but was careful to keep the fond smile on his lips. “You’re having a breakdown about paper.”

“The invitations are important!” Aziraphale protested “They’re the first piece of the wedding that the guests will see, they set the tone—”

“A breakdown over what color paper you like best,” Crowley spoke over him. “And now you sound like you’ve swallowed one of those horrible wedding websites. I know you. You don’t care this much about invitations. Will you please, for the love of whoever you like, tell me what is actually going on?”

Aziraphale twisted his hands together until Crowley squeezed his own, stilling them, and began running his fingers gently along the ring on his left finger—a new habit, that, but one that seemed to sooth them both. “I’m not sure that there’s really anything—” he tried, but Crowley overrode that one with ease.

“Angel. Please. If you ask me to spend another minute thinking about type faces, I may snap. I promise you, I’d sincerely rather hear about whatever is on your mind.”

Aziraphale hesitated another moment, but apparently he was done resisting. “Well,” he started, sounding awkward and avoiding Crowley’s gaze, although he didn’t try to tug his hands away. “It’s just. . . I know it’s the thing, these days. Much more common than it used to be, and with all this new technology I’m sure it’s quite a bit easier. Much better than having to wait for the post, I’m sure. But, it’s. Still. I’m not sure. . . “ He trailed off. Crowley bit his own tongue, forcibly keeping himself from urging them towards the point. Aziraphale was heading in the right direction, he’d get there on his own eventually. “Maybe I’m silly and old fashioned,” he added fretfully. “I’m sure most of the young people would laugh at me. But I’m just not sure—I don’t think I’m really cut out for living apart, especially over such a distance,” he blurted hurriedly, as if he’d lose the courage to say the words if he hesitated any more.

Crowley stared at him, fingers stilling as he tried to make sense of that. Aziraphale apparently took it for shock, because he hurried on, words tumbling over each other. “I should never want to keep you from doing as you wish, you know that. And I know that this is, of course, such an opportunity for you. I couldn’t possibly ask you to refuse. And I’m sure we could talk on the phone, or what do you call it, Watchface or whatever—”

“Facetime,” Crowley said automatically, thoughts still scrambling to catch up.

“—even every day, but it’s not the same thing, really. I—you were the one who wanted to move in here in the first place, you know, you can’t say you don’t understand. It’s different, being in the same place. And I, I’m just not certain I’m suited to it. I won’t tell you not to go. Or even beg you. But.” As his voice drifted to a halt his eyes had finally risen to meet Crowley’s. Now they stared at him, mutely imploring.

Crowley felt like he’d missed not just the first half of this conversation, but several leading up to it. Aziraphale’s speech felt like it called for a delicate unpicking of the intricate network of suppositions and assumptions woven into it, all culminating in perfectly reassuring proof that the angel was talking complete bollocks. Instead, Crowley just blurted out the truth. “I wasn’t going to go without you.”

It was Aziraphale’s turn to look startled. “What?”

“To Tokyo,” Crowley said. “That was what you were talking about, right?”

Aziraphale was still looking as at a loss as Crowley felt. “Or wherever they send you, yes.”

Crowley snorted a laugh that contained remarkably little humor. “Right. Angel. Did you really think I was just going to leave you behind?”

“I—I—well—” Aziraphale stuttered.

“Do you actually for one minute think I want to live halfway across the world from you?” Crowley demanded.

“Well. No. Not really that you wanted that, I suppose. But we all have to make sacrifices sometimes,” Aziraphale explained earnestly. “I went on the computer and I found a quite informative website for, well, young women, actually, I think it was written for, but I found it quite helpful. It explained quite clearly that sometimes careers require these things, and that it wasn’t really, well, fair, for a partner to hold you back from an opportunity. It was quite convincing, you know, I quite agree—I couldn’t possibly ask you to turn it down, not when you deserve everything they could give you and more—but you know, they had several articles about managing the challenges of a, er, ‘long-distance relationship’, and I just. I couldn’t quite convince myself that it was for me, I’m afraid.”

Somewhere the speech had gone from almost funny to very decidedly _not_. “Angel,” Crowley started, heart aching in some deep, unspecified way.

Aziraphale started at his tone, looking hopelessly guilty. “And before you start, this is why I didn’t tell you,” he said hurriedly. “I knew you’d say that, but I won’t have you feeling badly about it. I know it’s quite an honor, and it’s obvious that you want to go. The last thing I want to do is deprive you of your life as you should be living it. Two years isn’t so very long, for me, after all. I should be quite content to wait for you.”

“Aziraphale,” Crowley said loudly, unwilling to listen to any more of this. “You—you—you are an absolute idiot, do you know that? For the most intelligent person I know, I have no idea how you also manage to be the stupidest.” Aziraphale was just staring at him blankly. He hurried on, not wanting to let him get a word in first. “An absolute idiot. I’m not going to Tokyo or anywhere else unless you’re coming with me.”

Aziraphale was staring. “Go with you? Together?”

Crowley gaped at him. “Yes. Of course together! What the bloody hell did you think—no, don’t answer that, I know what you thought. Yes, you idiot, of course we’d be going together.” It sounded a little presumptuous to his own ears as he said it. Aziraphale loved Soho, loved his shop. “Only if you want to,” he added quickly. “You don’t have to. If you don’t, I probably won’t either. Just. That doesn’t mean you should feel like—”

“Oh, do shut up,” Aziraphale said.

But Crowley wasn’t done. “And I don’t know where you get the idea that _you_aren’t my life as I’m ‘meant to be living it,’ but you’d better get over that right now. I don’t have some regular human life and then you in addition, or over on the side, or whatever you think is going on. We’re getting married. You’re more a part of my life than anything or anyone else, and that’s the way it’s going to stay.”

Aziraphale’s eyes were swimming with tears, his smile small and tremulous. “I’ve never been to Japan.”

Crowley sank back against the cushions, abruptly aware of how tense he’d gotten. “Me neither. New experience for both of us.”

“I rather like that, my dear,” Aziraphale said, smile blossoming until Crowley couldn’t help but return it. “Going somewhere new together.” He reached out, almost tentatively, to set his hand on Crowley’s, who instantly and firmly returned the grasp.

“Just for a bit, mind you,” Crowley said. “We’re not leaving London for good.”

Aziraphale nodded in agreement. “I’m glad that’s settled. All that’s left is the invitations, then,” he said, glancing over at the slightly mangled scraps of paper on the coffee table. Now the slightly hopeless indecision in his voice was the familiarly reassuring tone. “I still don’t know—”

“The midnight blue,” Crowley said firmly.

“Really?” Aziraphale squinted at it, and Crowley could already hear the catalogue of protests coming.

“Yes,” he said decisively. “We have a more important decision to talk about, after all. I’m not waiting until next year to take you on a honeymoon, after all. Anywhere else you particularly fancy?”


	6. Chapter 6

Wedding decisions, it turned out, were significantly easier when one party wasn’t fretting themselves nearly ill over the prospect of a lengthy separation. Which was good, because there seemed to be a veritable mountain of choices to be made, ranging from the fairly major (who would officiate, what ceremony to use, and what band they could find on such short notice) to the mind-numbingly inconsequential (the precise shade of the napkins and the dimensions of the aisle runner, whatever invention of Hell that was supposed to be). Crowley and Aziraphale had spent a long Saturday afternoon working on the first set, resolutely ignoring as many of the latter as could be managed. Crowley was painfully aware of the specter of seating arrangements, lurking just out of sight like a mugger in a dark alleyway.

Aziraphale, paging through the booklet of ceremony variants proffered by the venue, was frowning dubiously. “Rather derivative, one feels,” he murmured. “More for the sake of the audience than the principals, I think. It’s a pledging of two lives to each other, not a show to entertain.”

Something about the tone of his voice caught Crowley’s attention. “Aziraphale,” he said, testing the words out in his head before he spoke them. “Do you actually want to have a wedding?”

Aziraphale looked up at him, frowning. “Of course I do, my dear. I know I may have been a little slow off the mark, and I am sorry for that, but I did say. I do very much want to marry you.”

“No, I know that,” Crowley said. “But do you really want the actual wedding?”

Aziraphale froze momentarily. “I, er, that is, well. To be quite honest with you, I’m not sure it is something I’d venture into of my own accord. But I’m not at all loath,” he added quickly. “Not if it will make you happy.”

“Well,” Crowley said, feeling properly trapped now.

Aziraphale squinted at him. “You want a wedding. Don’t you?”

Crowley found himself quite unusually at a loss for words. He’d be able to talk himself out of this corner, he was sure, if he could just have a minute to collect his thoughts—

“Now really, my dear,” Aziraphale said. “I remember quite distinctly, I asked whether you wished to have a wedding, and you said yes.”

“Er,” Crowley said.

Aziraphale’s squint sharpened. “Crowley?”

“Welllll,” Crowley tried. The angel’s expression didn’t soften. “I didn’t actually. I mean. I don’t really care, myself. I thought you’d like it,” he finished hurriedly.

Now Aziraphale was frowning mildly at him. “You only said you wanted one because you thought I did?”

Crowley tried not to squirm at his look. “You like that kind of stuff,” he muttered. “I know you said it’s all very human, but you like human things. And fancy parties with food and music and people to talk to. And, you know, feelings. Words about feelings. All of that.”

“Oh, my dear,” Aziraphale said, coming over to sit very close to him on the sofa. “That’s, you know, very sweet of you—”

“ ‘m not sweet,” Crowley muttered, and was soundly ignored as Aziraphale continued.

“—but why on earth didn’t you just ask me?”

The only thing for it now was make Aziraphale as uncomfortable as he was. Plus, as a bonus, it was the honest answer to his question. “Wasn’t sure if you’d tell me. You don’t ask me for things.”

Aziraphale’s frown, visible at the corner of his vision, deepened slightly. “You do things for me all the time, my dear.”

“Yeah, but not actually big things. There’s a difference between going a bit out of my way to drop your shirt off at your favorite dry cleaners and planning, you know, the happiest day of our lives or whatever.”

Unusually, Aziraphale seemed at a loss for words. “So, you thought I wanted a wedding but wouldn’t tell you because I wouldn’t want to put you out.”

“Pretty much,” Crowley agreed. “And I get that I misjudged that one. But can you really tell me that if you had wanted one but you thought I didn’t, you’d have actually told me that?”

From Aziraphale, there was only silence.

“Right.” Crowley’s voice was sharper than he’d meant it to be, and he reached for Aziraphale’s hand, trying to soften the effect. “So maybe we both have some things to work on. And, hey, it’s only a few weeks now to wait, really. The slog doesn’t have to last for much longer.”

Aziraphale’s frown was back, although it was less serious now. “Let’s not,” he said decisively, adding at Crowley’s dubious look, “Wait, I mean.”

Crowley eyed the piles of papers and brochures on the table in front of them dubiously. “Even if we could get a venue sooner I don’t think we could get through all of it that much quicker, even with you working on it twenty four hours a day.”

Aziraphale got up suddenly, moving kneel right in front of him, blocking the sight of the to-do list. He caught and held Crowley’s gaze with suddenly bright eyes. “You really don’t care about having a wedding?”

“Nah. As long as we get married, I’m not fussed either way.”

“Even if it’s already half-planned?”

Crowley thought half was probably an overly optimistic estimate. “It’s not like we’ve sent any invitations out yet.” He was pretty sure he knew where this was going. “If you’re asking me to elope, the answer is yes.”

Aziraphale’s smile lit his face. “How about now?”

Right now? Crowley took a scant moment to consider the idea. “Sounds good to me.”

“Do you trust me?”

That one took even less thought. “ ’Course.”

Aziraphale let out his breath in a gentle sigh as he pushed himself up and held out his hand. Crowley grasped it and was hauled instantly to his feet, Aziraphale tugging him gently towards the door. “You might, er, want to close your eyes,” he said, apparently as an afterthought, before he opened the bedroom door.

Crowley, of course, did no such thing. He clung tightly to Aziraphale’s hand as they moved through darkness that, he was pretty sure, wasn’t actually the hallway to the bathroom. Letting go seemed like a bad idea, though, so he followed. It only lasted for a handful of steps, anyway, before they were breaking through into bright sunlight and scorching, bone-dry air.

Crowley blinked, wishing he had his glasses to defend against the merciless light, and found a pair being pressed into his hand. Once he’d fumbled them on and could see again, he looked around. Sand stretched away as far as he could see, with no other sign of life—where on earth had Aziraphale brought them? When he turned around, though, there was something other than emptiness. A stone wall stretched into the distance in both directions and up, high, disappearing into the glare of the sky. It was definitely a wall, not a cliff; he could see how the stones had been fitted together, although it was more precise than any wall he’d seen before, the stones fitted perfectly without need for mortar. Were they even still on Earth anymore?

“Where are we?” he asked, turning to Aziraphale. The angel wasn’t wearing sunglasses, but he didn’t seemed bothered by the light, looking directly up at the wall without regard for the glare. Crowley wondered if his vision was better than a human’s, if maybe he could see the top of it clearly—he’d never thought to ask before.

“In the right spot,” Aziraphale said, sounding satisfied. “I did remember where it was. Bear with me a moment,” he said, turning to Crowley. “We’re not staying out here long.”

“Out here? Where—” Crowley cut himself off as Aziraphale felt carefully across the surface of the wall and somehow found an edge. He worked his fingertips around it and pulled, and a stone started to slide out. Crowley tried to step in and help, but Aziraphale grunted and told him to clear out of the way before pulling it out of the wall completely and setting it in the sand nearby. The edges of the hole were jagged, a contrast to the regularly-cut stones that made up the rest of the wall. Aziraphale pulled out another stone, and then another, setting them on the sand as well.

The draft of air that blew out of the opening was cool, and moist, and smelled like growing things; Crowley, peering through it at an angle, caught a glimpse of green. “How did you find that? I couldn’t see anything there,” he asked, rather incoherently.

“You can’t hide the gate from the guard,” Aziraphale said gently, and suddenly Crowley knew where they were.

“Aziraphale,” he breathed, glancing almost fearfully at the hole in the wall.

“It’s quite all right, my dear,” Aziraphale said. “Let me give you a hand.” He grasped Crowley’s arm firmly, helping steady him as he clambered through the gap.

The wall was thick, but not as thick as it should have been to support the weight of that many stones. Crowley shuffled forward on his knees and emerged, awkwardly, into a world of soft light filtered through green leaves. Even this close to the wall, massive trees spread their canopies far overhead, while understory trees soaked up every scrap of sunlight that made it through. The ground under his feet was covered in a dense patchwork of grasses and flowers; as he stepped aside to clear the opening he must have crushed some of them, releasing a sweet scent into the air.

He turned back to see Aziraphale stepping down too. He looked natural here, somehow, even in his wildly outdated wardrobe that had never, so far as Crowley had observed, blended in anywhere. Against the verdant backdrop, though, he practically glowed, clearly perfectly at home.

“Are we really supposed to be—” Crowley couldn’t stop himself from asking.

Aziraphale smiled at him. “Nobody will mind, if we just drop in for a bit,” he said reassuringly, before adding, rather undermining the effect, “Or, at least, I don’t expect that they’ll notice.”

The beauty of Eden was, somehow, both more than Crowley’s human senses could comprehend and as deeply familiar-seeming as the house in which he was raised. Everywhere he looked there were layered textures of green leaves overlapping, sunlight falling through in tiny flecks, with bright splashes of color from the flowers that hung from branches all around them. It was, like any garden, far from static—he could hear the gentle hum of insects and could trace bees and butterflies in their flight, while birdsong and rustling in the vegetation told of larger animals all around them.

It was all almost too much; beauty and perfection beyond what the Crowley’s mind could comprehend. Aziraphale, watching him closely, seemed able to tell. He pulled him closer, brushing a reassuring kiss against his lips. “You don’t need to worry,” he said quietly. “Not here. There’s nothing here that would hurt you anyway, and _nothing _that can touch you while I’m at your side.”

Crowley leaned his forehead against Aziraphale’s, closing his eyes for a moment. “’s just a lot,” he said quietly.

Aziraphale made a quiet noise of understanding. He stretched up and brushed his lips over each of Crowley’s eyelids. “Just enjoy it, my love,” he said. “You can. It _was _made for you in the first place, after all.”

Crowley had to open his eyes to kiss him at that. When he glanced around again, it was easier. Not a change in the garden itself, which was just as beautiful, and not in his sight, but in something deeper, as if a dial somewhere in his brain had been calibrated to the sights around him.

Aziraphale took his arm and led him onwards, past a brook with a splashing waterfall and a grove of trees with pale trunks and fluttering golden-green leaves. Beyond them the forest opened up into a wide meadow, bright in the sunlight after the shade of the trees. The springy moss and smaller wildflowers gave way to waving grasses, intermixed with swaths of color from flowers of every imaginable size and shape. Everything, it seemed, was in bloom all at once.

Aziraphale took a few steps out into the meadow, his hair lighting up in the sunlight, making a glowing corona that rivaled the halo he so rarely showed. He’d dropped Crowley’s arm but drew him after with just a glance, stepping out until the sun was warm on his back and Aziraphale was right there, smiling at him softly.

“Well, my dear?” he asked. “Will this do well enough?”

Crowley glanced around again at the carpet of greenery and flowers at their feet, the ancient trees beyond them. He couldn’t even truly compare it to the little walled garden in Soho where they’d been planning to do this, the difference between them was so vast. But yeah. A perfect meadow in the heart of paradise. It would probably do.

He stopped himself from saying something horrendously sappy about the only important thing being there already, although it was true enough, and settled for smiling back at Aziraphale. “Well, it’s definitely a garden,” he drawled. “But aren’t you forgetting something, angel?”

Aziraphale frowned at him, hand absently patting a pocket, and wasn’t that interesting. “And what would that be, my dear?”

Crowley gestured broadly at the empty meadow around them. “Pretty sure we do need someone else here, at the minimum.”

“An officiant! I’ll get us one,” Aziraphale said, smiling at him again. “I did think about that.”

He turned his face upward and said, in a perfectly conversational tone, “Nithanael? Could I trouble you for a moment?”

It seemed absurd. But a scarce heartbeat later there was a light growing under the trees, and a moment after that a figure stood on Aziraphale’s other side. As the light faded Crowley could make out more of the details; a long white robe, curling dark hair, all framed by a pair of wings as large and white as Aziraphale’s.

The angel—Nithanael, Crowley could only assume—looked around with sharp black eyes, gaze falling on them. “Aziraphale,” they said, sounding surprised. “It’s been a while.”

Unlike the other times Crowley had seen him talking to other angels, Aziraphale’s smile didn’t look forced. “A few centuries,” he agreed.

Nithanael’s gaze focused on Crowley for a long minute. He felt rather like he was being weighed, although for what he didn’t know. “Aziraphale,” the other angel said slowly. “Has the Almighty changed her mind? Are the humans to return to the garden?”

“Ah. Well. No,” Aziraphale said, but he was smiling, not anxious, as he said it. “It’s not an official return, so to say. Just popped in for a few minutes, you know. Didn’t think anyone would think too much of it.”

“And is there some particular reason, aside from implicating me in a minor act of disobedience, why you asked me to join you?” The tone of Nithanael’s voice put paid to Crowley’s pet theory that angels were constitutionally unable to understand sarcasm. Aziraphale, as usual, failed to notice.

“I was actually, er,” Aziraphale stuttered, seeming embarrassed for the first time in the conversation. “Hoping that you’d marry us.”

Nithanael’s eyebrows raised in apparent surprise. The look they gave Crowley this time was longer and more deliberate. “You and this human,” they said, finally.

“Yes,” Aziraphale said. The defiance that had edged his voice when Gabriel had questioned him was back, and it hurt Crowley to hear it. This was clearly an old friend; Aziraphale shouldn’t have to doubt their support.

“It’s unconventional,” they said, neutrally. Aziraphale made a face like that was a massive understatement, and Crowley found himself wishing that he’d asked more questions sooner. Was marriage even a concept that had much meaning for angels who weren’t Aziraphale? All this time, had he been expecting something that wasn’t even in the other’s nature?

“I haven’t exactly been the model of respectability anyway, of late,” Aziraphale said, with a slightly stiff smile. “Might as well embrace it.”

“Embrace _something_, anyway,” Nithanael muttered, a hint of a smirk at the corner of their mouth, and Crowley felt a first flash of warmth towards them. “And you will be happy?” they asked Aziraphale, watching him closely.

“Yes.” The word was spoken with a sincerity that could not be doubted, and Crowley felt his own chest tighten.

The look that Nithanael turned on him now was openly appraising, and more than a little bit skeptical. “And will you make Aziraphale happy?”

“Nithanael—” Aziraphale started to protest.

“In any way I can,” Crowley said, and then couldn’t resist. “More than Heaven ever did.”

“Crowley!” Aziraphale started to scold.

Oh, if he’d ruined all this with that jab, he might never be forgiven. Nithanael, though, was smiling. “Very well, then,” they said. “I would be honored to perform the ceremony.”

Aziraphale beamed, and then somehow he’d urged them all out to the edge of a meadow, a spot dappled with sunlight and surrounded by even more flowers than Crowley had seen so far.

“Aziraphale,” Nithanael said, sounding vaguely disapproving. “I really won’t marry you in this state.”

Aziraphale jumped, one hand going to his hair, the other to tug down his waistcoat. “Oh dear,” he said, apparently finding nothing wrong with either. “Do tell me, I’ll just take a moment to fix—”

“Not the earthly matter,” Nithanael said, amused now. “But you can’t get married while you’re hiding half of yourself. Do put on your best for your intended.”

Aziraphale looked startled, then nodded. “Of course,” he said, sounding abashed. For a moment Crowley worried that he’d made some kind of faux pas too—the dark t-shirt and jeans that he currently wore could hardly be construed as his “best”—but then Aziraphale was shifting beside him, and he realized what had been meant. Large white wings spread from his shoulders, fanning out behind him. The glow around his head was hard to see, in the bright day, but it still changed the light falling on his face, gilding his cheeks and brow.

Crowley couldn’t look away. Aziraphale looked over and caught him staring, his self-conscious look melting into a soft smile. He reached out a hand and Crowley took it, tucking it into his arm and holding it close.

When he looked back at Nithanael, they had also added a golden halo to the wings that had already been out, apparently in the spirit of the thing. The other angel was studying Aziraphale’s wings with a faint frown. “The state you keep them in, really,” they scolded.

Aziraphale flushed. “I hardly ever have them out down here,” he muttered. Crowley glanced back and forth between them; now that he was looking for it he could see that Nithanael’s were perhaps a bit smoother, but Aziraphale’s hardly looked so bad as all that.

Nithanael rolled their eyes. “Well, they’ll be his problem now,” they said. “Are you ready?”

Crowley looked, properly, at Aziraphale. He glowed, both in the sunlight and the light of his halo, and his wings were blindingly white behind him, but at the center of all that was the person who Crowley had loved for the last five years; ruffled white curls, gently flushed cheeks, and eyes that were studying him in turn, full or more love than he’d ever imagined could be directed at him. Even the incomprehensible beauty of Eden all around them faded in the background.

“I am,” he said, mouth suddenly dry as the moment sank in. Aziraphale nodded, and they both turned to face Nithanael, still hand in hand.

“In the beginning was the Word,” they began, with a gesture that seemed to take in all of their surroundings. “And the Word was God. And so God fashioned the heavens and the earth, and all who dwell in and above them, and knew that they were good. But greatest of all of this was Love; the uncountable love of the Creator for her creations, and the love that they bore for each other. In this love they hoped all things, believed all things, and endured all things. And their Creator wished only that they love each other and honor one another above themselves; and when they did this, they knew that it was good.

“May you who love set your love like a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm, for love is as fierce as death, its jealousy stronger than the grave. Many waters cannot quench love, nor can the floods sweep it away.”

Crowley couldn’t help but turn to watch Aziraphale at those words, the memory of his face as he insisted that even death wouldn’t part them burned into his mind. For the first time, he found that he believed it, impossible as it had seemed.

“And when love has been found, let all rejoice in it, as God rejoices with them. For perfect love drives out fear.” Nithanael’s eyes seemed knowing as they met his, as if they could sense his rising, reckless hope. They nodded, once, before looking away.

“Aziraphale, Principality, Guardian of the Eastern Gate,” they went on, turning to him. “As humans have done from the beginning, you have left your Father-and-Mother to cling to this man, with whom you will become one flesh. Do you promise to honor him, love him in truth and deed, and keep your faith in him, for all the time that will come?”

“I will,” Aziraphale said, looking directly at Crowley.

“Anthony J. Crowley.” Nithanael now turned to him. “You were made in the image of your Creator, who knew from the beginning that it was not good for man to be alone. You have chosen this angel to be your helper and partner. Do you promise to honor him, love him in truth and deed, and keep your faith in him, for all the time that will come?”

“I will,” Crowley said, almost inaudible to even his own ears. Aziraphale must have heard him, though, because he was beaming, impossibly bright.

“You have made your promises in the presence of God and each other, and are wed,” Nithanael said, then added, “I believe there is another tradition. Do you have—”

Aziraphale held out a closed hand, and when he opened it two gold bands lay gleaming on his palm. Nithanael laid his fingers over them, face tipped up. “These rings are the outward sign of an inward and spiritual grace, signifying to all a union in marriage. I ask that the two who wear them may live in Your peace and continue in Your favor all the days of creation.”

Aziraphale reached out, and Crowley gave him his hand. Delicately, as if he thought he might break him, he slid one of the bands onto his finger. It fit perfectly. Crowley took the other one carefully, Aziraphale’s hand now resting in his. He managed to slip it onto Aziraphale’s finger, although his own were trembling so much that he was almost certain that he’d miss. But then it was on, and he stared for a long moment at their two hands and the bands newly adorning them.

“Those whom God has joined together, let no one separate.” Nithanael said it simply, but Crowley felt the sudden, almost terrifying weight of the words. There was something else present, he thought, here in this meadow with the three of them. Something vast, greater than his mind could possibly comprehend.

But there at his side was Aziraphale, still holding his hand and looking at him with impossible love, and the heaviness was lifted and he could breathe again. And there was another human tradition that he was certainly not going to forgo. He pulled Aziraphale gently towards him using their grasped hands, and bent the scarce inch needed to kiss him. He was warm, and welcoming, a familiar home here in this strange place, this strange new moment.

“I am happy for you both,” Nithanael said once they’d parted, and it was clear that they meant it sincerely. “Nobody should be paying any attention to the Garden, at least for tonight,” they added, with a dry smile. And then they were gone in another blaze of light, and it was just Aziraphale and Crowley standing together in the meadow.

It was reflexive to lean closer, wrapping an arm around Aziraphale’s waist, bringing him in for another deep kiss. Aziraphale returned it as enthusiastically as ever, but somehow it didn’t seem like the moment for more. Crowley drew back slowly, content just to hold him. Aziraphale didn’t offer any objections.

“Do I get a tour?” Crowley asked. “There’s a certain tree that I understand is quite the attraction. . . “

Aziraphale snorted. “I’m not taking you anywhere near _there_, my dear. I’m quite sure you’d manage to find a way to make humanity fall again, or something even more absurd.”

Crowley raised his eyebrows. “What do you think I could do that would be worse than introducing sin into the world?”

“One shudders to think.” Aziraphale stepped back and took his arm, steering him gently in what seemed like a random direction. “You _are_the one who out-tempted the demon who got it all started in the first place.”

Crowley looked down at him, startled. “Lazaram? He was the one who did the whole eat the apple bit?”

Aziraphale sniffed. “Yes, and I’ve never known how he managed it.”

“Not the sharpest tool in the shed,” Crowley agreed. “And it can’t have been his personal charm.”

“Yes, well, you try telling the committee doing the post-mortem analysis that. Can’t prevent future incidents if we don’t know what caused them in the first place, you know, but how I was supposed to be able to tell them? It was a big garden, I didn’t follow the humans around all the time or anything. Would have been remarkably awkward if I had. Anyway, it wasn’t like it was all going to happen again.” Aziraphale looked abashed. “I may have let his reputation get a little bit embellished. If you ask me, it was all down to the sleep deprivation. Poor Adam just couldn’t think straight.

Crowley frowned at him. “Sleep deprivation? And, hold on, Adam?”

“Cain was teething, the poor thing,” Aziraphale said. “Up half the night, and his parents with him, of course. Eve had just gotten him down for a nap, Adam wanders off and comes back with a snack, and next thing we know it’s a flash of divine wrath and they’re supposed to be out within the hour. Woke the baby, of course, so there were all three of them crying, and me trying to get them all on their way before the Almighty decided that they were disobeying again. Not really the best of days,” he added thoughtfully.

Crowley was listening in fascination, eyes alight. “Seems like a few things got a bit fudged in translation.”

“Oh, of course they did,” Aziraphale said, in tones of ages-old exasperation. “That’s the oral tradition for you. I did try to get everything straight, once they started writing it all down, but by then nobody wanted to listen.”

By the time they’d reached the far end of the meadow, Crowley could hear the sound of running water. A brilliantly clear stream ran along the edge of the forest, which seemed younger and more open here.

“Is this what Heaven is like?” Crowley asked without thinking, then wondered if the question sounded a foolish to Aziraphale as it did to him. He still wanted to know the answer, though. “Like this, but more?”

Aziraphale laughed quietly, although it was hard to tell if he was really amused. “Goodness, no. They’ve gone for quite a different aesthetic up there.”

Right, he did remember. “Stolen human buildings, you said.”

“Something like that,” Aziraphale agreed. He seemed uninclined to discuss it further, turning to steer them along the mossy bank of the stream. They walked in silence for a few minutes, Crowley watching the jewel-bright dragonflies that darted over the water and listening to the sound of the current. It was getting late into the afternoon, the light turning gold as it slanted through the branches. Crowley just knew, somehow, that the sunset was going to be amazing.

Aziraphale made a little noise in the back of his throat, and Crowley turned to look at him. He was already watching Crowley closely, a faint frown creasing his forehead.

“Angel?” Crowley prompted, when nothing more followed.

“This is—this was—” Aziraphale stumbled over his words. “Good?”

“’Course it was,” Crowley said easily, keeping his tone light even in the face of Aziraphale’s obvious anxiety. “The garden’s loads better, and I didn’t want to say earlier, but I was pretty sure that the only band we would have been able to book would have been terrible. What makes you ask?”

Aziraphale’s answering smile was tight and nervous. “It wasn’t—well. Not too fast?”

Ah, that explained his reluctance. “I told you you couldn’t go too fast for me, remember? Anywhere you want to go, angel, I’m with you.”

That lightened the worry in his eyes, although Crowley only had a moment to notice before Aziraphale was launching himself at him, pulling him close and kissing him frantically.

The restraint that they’d both felt earlier had evaporated. Crowley managed to get a hand up to Aziraphale’s collar, taking care of the first few buttons.

“I take it back,” he mumbled into the base of Aziraphale’s neck, where his lips and tongue had been busy a moment before. “Should’ve stayed home. Where there’s a bed.”

Aziraphale laughed at that, a breathless note in it. “Trust me when I say—ah—that it’s not necessary. Do just fine—oh, Crowley—on the moss.”

In no way did Crowley want to stop what he was doing to test the assertion, but perhaps this time he could trust the angel. He made quick work of the rest of Aziraphale’s clothes, helped and occasionally hindered by his eager hands, and then lowered him to sit on the moss, pressing another kiss to his upturned lips.

Aziraphale, it turned out, looked just as natural here without his clothing as he did with it, even with the wings, a pale, gently rounded figure against the dark green of the thick moss as he watched Crowley unceremoniously strip off his jeans. He spared a moment to wonder if that’s how he’d been before, here—if the humans hadn’t thought to wear clothes, it wouldn’t have made much sense if the angels had, now would it.

His rather peaceful, angelic effect was broken by the impatient noise that he made as Crowley finally emerged victorious from the jeans. Crowley took a step in his direction and sank to his knee in front of him, an odd echo of the proposal that they’d never even had. He took Aziraphale’s hand, touch feather light as he caught it and guided it to his lips, pressing them gently against the smooth metal of the new ring around it. The angel made a quiet, breathless sound, and surged forward into Crowley.

It wasn’t like the first time all over again. It was better than the first time, because he knew Aziraphale—his _husband_—like he knew his own body. Knew the meaning behind every sigh and sound, where and how to touch to coax even more of them from his throat. But there was a newness to it, anyway, whether it was from the garden itself or that word that kept filling his mind—husband, _husband_, bound together now not just by the choices of the moment, but by the promises they’d made and whatever—Whoever—had witnessed them make them.

“I love you,” he gasped, as he moved inside Aziraphale, rewarded with a collection of incoherent syllables that were probably intended in kind. “I love you,” he said again, as Aziraphale’s mouth moved against his skin, mapping something new against his body.

The angel lifted his head just far enough to say “Forever,” in a tone that was not, precisely, hopeful. It wasn’t even a promise. It was simply a statement of how the world would be. It had Crowley tensing and gasping against him before he managed to collect himself and roll them over, pressing Aziraphale into the moss as he covered him in desperate kisses.

“I’m not afraid,” Aziraphale whispered in his ear, sometime in the night as they lay tangled up in one another, sleep seeming irrelevant in the velvety darkness. “Right now, I’m not afraid.”

Crowley kissed Aziraphale as the sun rose. But with the growing light he found that the mood between them lightened too, away from the declarations and whispered confessions of the night. It was Aziraphale who left him, merely laughing at his sounds of protest, to return a few minutes later with hands full of fruits—although no apples, Crowley noticed. They both laughed when Crowley, attempting to feed Aziraphale a perfectly ripe berry, missed, smearing purple juice across the angel’s cheek. Aziraphale soundly rejected his offer to clean it off himself but kissed him anyway, the flavor of the berry bright on his tongue.

It was when the fruit was gone and Crowley was reluctantly contemplating moving—they couldn’t stay forever, he knew that—when a moment from the day before came back to his mind. “What did they mean?” he asked Aziraphale, explaining further at his perplexed look. “Nithanael. When they said that your wings were my problem now.”

“Oh.” Aziraphale looked vaguely embarrassed. “That. It’s really nothing for you to worry about, my dear.”

Crowley raised an eyebrow. “C’mon. They sounded serious enough about it. Tell me.”

Aziraphale gave in. “It’s just tradition. When two angels are, well, close—in whatever way, it’s not restricted to a particular type of—well, anyway. They generally do each other’s wings. In a regular kind of way.”

Crowley grinned. Aziraphale shifted, looking mildly trapped. “You really needn’t feel yourself obligated,” he said quickly. “I’m really more than capable—”

“No, no,” Crowley purred, eyes alight. “I’m not letting you get out of this one so easily, angel. Besides. I’m not about to let my husbandly duties slide.” The word struck both of them, making them pause. Husband. Crowley didn’t think he was going to get tired of that. He made a little twirling motion with a finger. “Go on, then.”

Aziraphale made a face but did turn, spreading his wings. He hadn’t vanished them at all since the ceremony, but he’d been keeping them mostly tucked in close to his body. They were brilliant in the morning light, but as Crowley looked more closely he thought he could see what Nithanael had meant. Some of the feathers gleamed brightly, but others were duller with dust, and he could see where barbs were misaligned. He reached out a hand, suddenly unsure.

“Don’t have a pair of these, myself,” he said, and Aziraphale craned his head around to try to see him. “May need a little help here.”

Aziraphale smiled helplessly at him. “Come around here, I’ll show you.”

Crowley watched his fingers carefully as he found a ruffled feather and smoothed it between them. He watched a few more and then, emboldened, reached out himself. When he glanced at Aziraphale’s face, he was watching him with a soft look that Crowley couldn’t meet for more than a moment before dropping his own gaze.

They worked in peaceful silence for some time. Eventually Aziraphale shifted, restless, and Crowley turned his attention from the feathers to his face. “It can take quite a while,” he said gently. “And there’ll be time enough.”

Crowley couldn’t argue. “Just as long as you don’t decide that you can just hide them away and I’ll forget, angel.”

That won a smile. “I know you better than that, my dear.”

Even through the peace of the garden, which seemed to have sunk in to his very bones, Crowley could feel the reluctance in the air shared between them. Loath as he was to hasten them along, he decided to take mercy on the angel. “I don’t suppose we can stay forever.”

Aziraphale looked at him, gratitude that he hadn’t had to be the one to say it clear on his face. “It probably wouldn’t be wise, no.”

It wasn’t hard to summon a smile, which was instantly mirrored. “Well, then,” Crowley said, standing and offering Aziraphale his arm. “Allow me.”

“As much as I hate to say it,” Aziraphale said, giving Crowley a long look, “Clothing might be indicated. Shoes, at the minimum, if we’re going to walk.”

Crowley laughed at that and began gathering it up, sorting items and passing Aziraphale’s back to their rightful owner. Once clothed, Aziraphale offered his arm, smiling conspiratorially at Crowley as he took it. “No harm in taking the long way round,” he said, and gently pulled Crowley after him.

They did, indeed, take a longer route, following the stream into the little wood and then back out again, skirting around still pools and pausing to admire a small waterfall before Aziraphale guided them back past the meadow—Crowley had to stop and kiss him at approximately the spot where they’d stood the day before—and, inevitably, back to opening in the wall, where he helped Crowley back through the gap before filling it in again.

Aziraphale touched the stone, gently, as if reluctant to leave. Crowley thought he understood, a little—if Eden was the first place on Earth that you’d known, how could the rest of the world ever be anything but a disappointment?

“This is where She spoke to me,” Aziraphale said, quietly.

It wasn’t what Crowley had expected him to say, and it took his brain a moment to catch up. “Who?” he asked, gently. “Eve?”

Aziraphale shook his head. “The Almighty. She asked me about the sword.”

“Oh,” Crowley said, amazed all over again at the audacity of what he had done yesterday. They were standing on the spot where God had spoken to his fian—husband. His husband, who had spoken with God.

“It was the last time,” Aziraphale said, and his voice was impossibly sad. “And now she doesn’t speak to anyone, any more.”

“Oh, angel,” Crowley said, and he folded Aziraphale in his arms. He could never understand, not really, and he knew that, but at least he could offer what comfort he could. It was different, with the wings—not just that he had to work his arms around him, but it changed Aziraphale’s whole center of gravity. Even so, holding him still felt like the most natural thing in the world. 

“I just wish I understood,” Aziraphale whispered against him. “I wish she would explain. I miss her,” he said simply.

It wasn’t the first time that Crowley had hated God. But it was the first time that it was personal—not the directionless, generalized anger at the cruelty of the world, but a specific, agonizingly intimate fury. How _dare_she do this to one who clearly still bore so much love for her? Bad enough for the rest of them, but how could she turn her back on Aziraphale?

Aziraphale leaned against him for a moment longer, then pulled back far enough to see his face. “It doesn’t matter, really, I suppose,” he said. Crowley was well used to Aziraphale’s voice when he was trying to be brave when he was really miserable, but that wasn’t the tone he had now. He sounded perfectly sincere. “This is the past,” he said, with a wave at his hand towards the wall and, perhaps, God Herself. “It’s rather past time to be focusing on the future.”

And with that he took Crowley’s hand again, and tugged him towards home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Never thought I'd end up writing a wedding scene in a fic, but here we are! I think I may have spent more time writing this one than adapting my own wedding ceremony. I ended up really liking this chapter, though, so I hope you enjoyed!


	7. Chapter 7

Crowley glared down at the ring on his finger. “She’s going to be insufferable,” he muttered.

“Who, dearest?” Aziraphale asked, poking his head into the room. His hair looked even more ruffled than usual, and Crowley had to fight back a temptation to go deal with it. He could always attack his husband with a comb before he left, if he had to.

“That woman,” Crowley said. Aziraphale pursed his lips, and he relented. “Celery.”

“Cecily,” Aziraphale corrected him. “She’s your co-worker, Crowley, I do think you might try to remember her name.”

“Don’t need to know her name,” Crowley muttered. “She does all the talking anyway, it’s not like I need to say much.”

“Anyway, dear,” Aziraphale said, apparently ignoring that, “What were you saying about her?”

“I said that she’s going to be insufferable,” Crowley said, raising his voice as Aziraphale vanished back into the other room. He squinted down at his jacket, currently lying on the bed, but the bit of lint that he thought he’d seen was gone, now. “I told her we weren’t in any hurry.”

“Well, you are in a hurry,” Aziraphale said, but he didn’t sound worried about it. “Or you will be, if you don’t get a wiggle on. I shouldn’t think you’d want to be late to this all-important board meeting.”

“It’s not a—” Crowley started, then decided there wasn’t much of a point. Aziraphale had been rather put out last night when Crowley had insisted on going to bed at a reasonable hour, as he was expected to meet with a prospective client first thing the following morning. Hence contorting himself into a suit at this ungodly hour of a Monday morning. “She’s going to want to know all about it, you know,” he grumbled. “The ceremony, the cake, whatever. She’s that sort.”

“Ah,” Aziraphale said, appearing again. His hair was marginally neater, but he had somehow managed to get a little down feather stuck to the shoulder of his shirt. He couldn’t actually have had his wings out, could he?

Crowley plucked it off as Aziraphale came over, picked up the jacket, fastidiously brushed off an invisible speck, and helped Crowley into it. “Tell her the truth, I suppose.”

“The truth?” Crowley asked sarcastically. “Right, we just nipped off to the literal paradise lost where we got married by an angel, had a truly charming 24-hour honeymoon, and here I am, back at work on Monday wearing a ring that my new husband literally conjured out of nothing.”

As usual, Aziraphale didn’t seem to notice the tone. “You hardly need to go into details,” he said equably, shuffling the pile of papers that Crowley had left on the bedside table into a more orderly stack. “We decided that a full-blown wedding wasn’t quite the thing for us, so we switched to a small private ceremony. In a garden, if you like. Took some time over the weekend to celebrate, but we’re planning a longer honeymoon at some point soon.”

He finished organizing the papers and slid them into Crowley’s briefcase, handing it to him with a brilliant smile. Crowley couldn’t help but return it as he took it, their fingers briefly brushing. He didn’t have the heart to say that he didn’t need any of them for the day’s work.

“Sure, angel,” he said instead. “I’m sure that would work.”

His direst predictions were, unfortunately, proven true. Celery had no sooner stepped into the conference room than she’d zeroed in on the scrap of gold on his left hand.

“Crowley!” These were new and appalling heights of delight, far, far too early on a Monday morning. “_What _is that?”

Evasion had been challenging. Crowley managed a succession of one-word answers that lasted until their manager arrived to officially start the meeting, and managed to slither out unnoticed when they broke for lunch, so it was only the coffee breaks that really allowed her an opportunity to pump him for information. “Old friend of Aziraphale’s,” he said in response to a question about the officiant, thinking that the MI6 interrogators could probably stand to learn a thing or two from her. “Oh, sorry, I think Lionel wants me.”

It was no surprise that by the end of the day he was running low on patience. He stopped at home just long enough to sweep up Aziraphale and then carried him off to the quiet Japanese restaurant that they most often frequented after days when Aziraphale had been overwhelmed with customers*.

*That is to say, any number between five and ten, depending on how stubborn they were about trying to buy a book.

The serene surroundings and exquisite food soothed his mood, and they were both in better spirits by the time they were walking home. Crowley had drifted a few steps ahead as Aziraphale slowed—didn’t even stop, but slowed his steps—to glance at something in a shop window. He hadn’t even realized it until he heard a cool voice somewhere behind him. “Hello, Aziraphale.”

There were plenty of people in the neighborhood who knew them, of course. But this wasn’t a voice that Crowley recognized, and he thought he would have. It had a timbre, an odd sort of resonance, that he couldn’t have forgotten. Somehow, it set all of hairs on his arms on end.

He turned, ignoring the pedestrian who nearly ran into him, to see three people who definitely hadn’t been there before but who were now standing between him and Aziraphale. Two of them stood shoulder-to-shoulder, blocking him off from the sidewalk, while the third flanked him, uncomfortably close. All wore suits in pale grey or beige, and Crowley had a sudden, stunningly horrible realization that he knew who—what, anyway—they were.

“You weren’t expecting to see us?” the one who’d spoken asked.

Without even apparently trying, they’d managed to insinuate themselves quite firmly between him and any escape route, and were still advancing. When Crowley heard Aziraphale’s back hit the wall with a thud he didn’t stop to think, just moved to get to him and stop whatever was about to happen.

He meant to, anyway. But he’d barely taken a step before he hit an invisible barrier; softer than a wall, but no more yielding when he pressed against it. A glance aside showed that everyone else could walk down the sidewalk just fine. He was the only one who couldn’t even force a hand forward through the air.

He was about to call out to Aziraphale for help, so that he could come rescue him in turn, when he caught the momentary flash of the angel’s gaze in his direction. His face was resolute and unapologetic. Oh. It was Aziraphale himself who had done this.

Crowley glared, mouthing imprecations, but Aziraphale didn’t look at him again. His attention was on the other three angels, an ingratiating smile on his face. “Michael,” he said, trying and failing to sound casual. “It’s been rather a while, hasn’t it.”

“Nine hundred years,” she agreed. “Since you abandoned your post to debase yourself with the humans."

Aziraphale’s attempt at a smile grew even more fixed. “Uriel, Sandalphon,” he tried, nodding at the other two in turn. “It’s a, er, well. Seeing you again.”

“Save it, Aziraphale,” the one who Crowley was pretty sure was Uriel said warningly. “You know why we’re here.”

“No,” Aziraphale said bravely. “Unless it’s about the Antichrist, in which case I have to tell you, if you’d asked me—”

“But we didn’t ask you,” Uriel said.

“Your input wasn’t wanted,” Sandalphon added with a leer.

“All these excess miracles of yours,” the first one said, and oh, fuck, that was the _fucking Archangel Michael_, and Crowley had no idea what he was going to do about this.

“You’re not authorized to perform miracles,” Uriel said, taking a step towards Aziraphale. He tried to cringe back, but he was already flat against the wall. Crowley’s hands were beginning to shake. He was not just going to stand back and watch this happen. He tried frantically to figure out if he had any choice in the matter. There had to be some kind of option, here. “And Rahaliel reported in right away. Told us all about your little visit with her. Trying to interfere, were you?”

Aziraphale waved a hand in a small, defeated arc. “I just, I think it’s a mistake. I’ve been thinking, you know, about all of this. And it seems to me that if the point was, well, to let the humans make choices and see how it went, it’s a bit premature to call a halt. They’ve only barely gotten the hang of it, you know. How things work and all. They keep figuring new things out, and I think we really should see where they end up—"

“Enough,” Michael interrupted. Her voice was utterly dispassionate. “You will be welcome home if you wish to return, but it must be your choice. Are you ready to decide?”

Aziraphale’s hands fluttered before settling at the hem of his waistcoat. Crowley, watching helplessly, had forgotten how to breathe. “I did tell you all some time ago. That while I wasn’t, per se, renouncing Heaven, and certainly not God, I didn’t feel that my own activities were quite consistent with—”

“Aziraphale.” She cut him off again. “It’s time to pick a side.”

“We were all made by the Almighty,” Aziraphale said in a small voice. “There shouldn’t have to be any sides.”

Both Uriel and Sandalphon moved towards him, and Crowley had seen enough. He couldn’t do his husband any good standing here pressed against an invisible wall, but the faint glimmerings of an idea had started to form in his mind. He turned and hurried off, far too cowardly to look back and see whether Aziraphale watched him leave.

They were less than a block from the bookshop, and it took him hardly any time to reach the Bentley. In a moment he had the key in the ignition and was swinging the car in a wide U-turn, ignoring the honking traffic and startled pedestrians. He pulled back towards the alley, feeling a surge of relief as he made it past the spot on the sidewalk where he’d been stuck before.

Aziraphale was still backed against the wall, but instead of being flattened against it he was bent forward around his middle, looking pained. Uriel was just stepping back from him, shaking her hand slightly. Michael looked as impassive as ever, while Sandalphon was openly enjoying himself.

Crowley felt rage surge in him. As Uriel stepped back they were, momentarily, all in a line in front of Aziraphale. There was no time to think about what he was about to do. Crowley aimed the Bentley down the alley and pressed the gas pedal down.

He was never going to forget the feel of the car hitting the succession of bodies. On the other hand, he was also always going to remember the look on Aziraphale’s face as he took in what had happened—shock quickly followed by glowing, open-mouthed wonder. “Crowley,” he breathed, a smile starting to grow, before he remembered to be shocked again. “What did you do?”

Crowley let himself out of the car and stared down at the spot where the dea—discorporated bodies had been a moment before. Now the pavement was empty. He wasn’t sure if it was Aziraphale’s doing or something about the nature of angelic bodies. Perhaps it didn’t really matter.

“Seemed like they were bothering you,” he said. He fancied that the tremble in his voice was too minor to keep him from sounding as cool as he meant to. He remembered just what he’d managed to interrupted, and looked worriedly at Aziraphale. “Are you ok?”

“I’m fine,” Aziraphale assured him absently. He moved stiffly as he came around to the front of the car, but he didn’t appear to have suffered any major damage. “Thank for the timely, er, intervention.”

“It was nothing,” Crowley said with an airy wave of his hand. “I didn’t kill them, did I?” he couldn’t quite help himself from asking.

“No, no,” Aziraphale said quickly. “Just discorporated. They’ll be back in Heaven already. Just need some new bodies before they can come back down. Archangels, they’ll probably even be exempted from the paperwork.” He crouched down in front of the Bentley, and for the first time Crowley let himself look down at the bonnet. It was crumpled, as he’d known it must be. Before he could even start trying to think of who in London he’d trust to fix it, Aziraphale was sweeping his hand lightly over the dents. There was the sound of metal popping and a faint tinkle of glass reassembling, and in a moment it looked just as it had before.

“Should you be doing that?” Crowley couldn’t stop himself from asking. “Wasn’t your using miracles what they were all upset about?”

Aziraphale waved a hand dismissively. “They can’t do anything about it,” he said. “Especially not now. Besides, very soon they’ll all be too busy to be thinking about me.” He went to stand, putting a hand on the car to lever himself up, but let out a grunt of pain before he’d gotten very far.

Crowley managed to get a hand under his elbow, helping him up the rest of the way. “They did hurt you,” he said, fury rising again.

“Minor damage only. It will pass soon enough.” Once he was up, Aziraphale seemed to be moving fairly well, if carefully.

They were starting to attract attention, the classic car half sticking out of the alley; Crowley didn’t mind if the tourists wondered what they were up to, but he really didn’t want to have to make up a story for the neighbors if they started asking questions. “I’ll take you home,” he said, “Get in.” He opened the door and watched Aziraphale as he carefully settled himself in the seat before getting in himself.

He drove the scant distance home at a slower speed than he’d ever driven anywhere before, listening carefully to every noise Aziraphale made for any indication of discomfort. He insisted on taking half his weight as he pulled him out of the car and hovered as Aziraphale slowly climbed the stairs to the flat. He rounded up pillows and hovered some more as Aziraphale settled down on the sofa, arranging them until he was perfectly comfortable. Only then did he duck into the kitchen for a bottle of wine and a pair of glasses, returning to drop himself bonelessly onto the sofa and splash a generous measure into each.

He handed one to Aziraphale, who took a healthy swallow, and followed suit. They sat there in silence for a few minutes until Aziraphale shifted fretfully. “That back there was very kind of you, but I do wish you hadn’t.”

Crowley gaped at him. “I wasn’t about to let you be beat up by the goon squad,” he said flatly. “Don’t care who they are.”

“It’s just. . .” Aziraphale trailed off. “I don’t particularly wish you to come to their attention.”

Crowley tried to summon a smirk. “Ashamed to be seen with a human? You weren’t so fussed when it was Nithanael, but I suppose the boss is a bit different. . .”

“Of course not,” Aziraphale snapped, looking offended. “But I’m an angel, regardless of my current, er, employment status. They’re hardly going to do anything drastic to me. But. Well. Humans are so short-lived in comparison, you know. I’m not sure they all, er, quite got into the habit of valuing your lives as much as they should. I’m probably overreacting, but I’d rather they simply didn’t think about you.”

Crowley didn’t know what to say in response to that, and they lapsed back into silence for a few minutes.

“So,” Crowley started, feeling awkward but needing to ask. “You said I discorporated them. Is it, like, impossible to kill angels? Just a body, and all that jazz?”

Aziraphale looked up from his glass. “Mostly,” he said. His voice was clear but his eyes were softened by the wine, and Crowley was glad to see it. They’d both earned it, today. “There’re a few things, I suppose. Hellfire is theorized to be able to destroy angels, just as holy water can destroy a demon. There are certain specialized weapons.”

“But nothing that’s, you know, here. On earth. Normal stuff won’t really hurt you?” Crowley could hear the emotion in his own voice, but he couldn’t quite seem to stifle it. The wine was a double-edged sword, after all.

“Not much. Not permanently,” Aziraphale agreed, watching him with soft eyes.

“So you’ll be fine,” Crowley said, finally getting to the heart of it. “No matter what happens.”

“I—” Aziraphale stuttered to a halt. “Fine isn’t quite the word I’d use,” he said quietly after a long moment.

“But if it all goes pear-shaped—”

Aziraphale, distracted, pouted. “Pears. ‘ll miss pears, you know.”

“—_if _it all goes pear-shaped,” Crowley repeated doggedly, “and everything goes—” he waved a hand wildly, “You know, poof, you’ll be fine. Just pop back up to Heaven like they did?”

Aziraphale looked like he was choosing his words carefully, although Crowley didn’t think he’d bothered to sober up. “Broadly, I suppose. The lead-up, anyway. The final battle might—that is, it might be a little bit more involved. But, my dear, what’s brought all this on? You really needn’t worry about me, you know."

Crowley’s smile was entirely unamused. “Well, I think we can give up on Heaven doing anything about the Antichrist.”

Aziraphale sighed. “I’m afraid you’re right about that.”

“So, what’s next?”

Aziraphale settled back against the carefully constructed pile of cushions, as close to slouching as he ever got. “The son of the American ambassador. I can’t imagine that we’ll be able to get anywhere near the boy.”

Crowley had to agree. “So, what else can we do? Anything that isn’t about the Antichrist himself?”

Aziraphale sighed heavily. “Nothing springs to mind. Keep an eye out. An opportunity may present itself. In the meantime—” he lifted the bottle of wine, cocking an eyebrow. Crowley nodded and held out his glass for a top-off. Aziraphale obliged and poured the remainder of the bottle into his own glass. “We may as well make the most of what we've got.”

**

It was hardly any surprise that, following recent events, Crowley found himself reluctant to let Aziraphale out of his sight for long. They could come back any time, after all, and they were angels. He doubted that keeping the front door locked would keep them out if they wanted in. It was perhaps rather ridiculous to think that his own presence would keep Aziraphale safe, especially when Aziraphale was so evidently determined to keep him out of it if at all possible, but his rational brain had taken a holiday, and his baser instincts were running the show. They wanted Aziraphale within sight at all times.

It was with firm determination, therefore, that he approached their after dinner conversation on Wednesday night. “Fancy a trip to the countryside, angel?”

Aziraphale looked over at him, smiling. “Certainly. What were you thinking, my dear? A picnic this weekend, perhaps?”

“A bit sooner,” Crowley admitted. “Got to make a site visit to the Babylonica site tomorrow. Thought maybe you’d want to ride along.”

“Ah,” Aziraphale said, enthusiasm dimming slightly. As if he hadn’t been the one to suggest that he come along sometime in the first place. “I had intended to open the shop—”

“This’ll be more fun,” Crowley said confidently. He let a trace of a wheedle enter his voice. “If you’re in the country for the day nobody can try to buy a book, after all.”

Aziraphale tutted, although his eyes were warm and amused. “I’m an angel, my dear,” he said primly. “I am innately immune to temptation of all kinds—”

Crowley couldn’t help his snort at that. Fortunately the laugh lines around Aziraphale’s eyes just deepened at it instead of lapsing into true irritation. “That so?” he asked, smirking. “Then I suppose you won’t mind if I just finish off the last of the chocolates—”

Aziraphale whirled back around at that, abandoning the pile of washing up to stride forward and pin Crowley against the counter with his hips, batting aside his token resistance and plucking the box of chocolates out of his hand. “Fiend,” he said fondly, peering over Crowley’s shoulder to select his choice from the remaining chocolates in the box.

“It’s supposed to be a lovely day.” Crowley took advantage of Aziraphale’s nearness to murmur right in his ear, not missing his shiver as his breath brushed against him. “A scenic drive into the country, and a nice old estate for you wander around while I do some sketching and consult on sustainable floorings. The gardens are worth seeing, even if they’re a bit neglected. Can bring a picnic, if you like.”

Aziraphale abandoned his perusal of the chocolates, leaning back enough to catch Crowley’s lips in a brief kiss. He popped the chocolate he’d finally chosen into his mouth, giving a happy little wiggle that Crowley could feel in personal, intimate detail. “Temptation accomplished. I suppose you’ll want an early start, then.”

**

“It’s rather nice,” Crowley admitted as he stepped around the hood of the car to open Aziraphale’s door. “The village, I mean, whatever it’s called—”

“Tadfield,” Aziraphale interjected, smiling in thanks as he slid out of the car and Crowley swung the door closed.

“That. It’s—” Crowley had to search for the words. His usual vocabulary wasn’t quite cutting it today. “Nice,” he settled for again, for lack of a better alternative. “Can almost see why someone would live out here. I mean, it’s not London, but. It’s—” he refused to say nice again. “I like it.”

Aziraphale smiled at him. “I’m not surprised. It’s—” He paused his steps momentarily, closing his eyes, an abstracted expression creeping over his face and one hand coming absently to rest on his chest. “There is something here,” he said distractedly. “This whole area. It’s all rather—well. It feels loved.”

That caught Crowley’s attention. “Loved? That’s—”

Aziraphale waved his dismissive tone away, finally starting to walk again. “Someone—or something, I’m not sure exactly—loves this place. A very great deal. Do try to look a little less cynical, my dear,” he added with gentle reproof. Intriguingly, a faint blush was suffusing his cheeks. “It actually, ah, reminds me of the flat. After you’d spent all that time re-doing it for us. The same feeling of care. Over this whole area, actually. Someone _cherishes _it.”

Crowley could feel his own cheeks turning slightly pink. It was true that he had, perhaps, put more thought into the details of the design of their flat than he had any other project, but that was really purely practical. He had to live with the consequences of any mistakes, after all. The implication that it had left fingerprints of, of—whatever—was a bit much. It was like the angel, really, to confuse simple diligence with soppier feelings. “That’s—you—that sound ridiculous, I hope you know.”

Aziraphale was watching him, the corners of his eyes crinkling up in a fond smile. “Of course, dear. How silly of me, to ascribe finer feelings to a matter of simple practicality.”

That was the enough. He turned on his heel, startling the angel, who didn’t put up a fight as Crowley took hold of his coat, backing him up the few steps to the wall next to the door they’d been approaching. He was pressed closely along the entire length of Aziraphale, pinning him against the wall and enjoying the feel of him pressing back, trying to get even closer. Their faces were close enough that their breath mingled together. Aziraphale’s eyes were fixed on his mouth and he smirked, enjoying the involuntary reaction that it earned him. “If you think, angel, that you can malign—"

“Namaste.” The sound of the crisp voice coming from a couple of yards away made them both jump. Crowley kept his eyes on Aziraphale just long enough to appreciate the complicated face he made at the greeting before pulling back and turning towards the newcomer.

The woman standing before them was not, in all the details, the same client who Crowley had last seen at a meeting in London some months ago. Gone was the neatly tailored black suit. In its place was a pair of what Crowley strongly suspected were knitwear only made to look like real trousers, topped by a beige knit blazer over a drapy blue shirt. Instead of her sleekly straightened hair she sported curls drawn up into a large bun on the top of her head. She looked like she’d be ready to go straight from a board meeting into a yoga studio, even though Crowley strongly suspected that she’d never done so much as a backbend in her life.

“Sorry to break in on an intimate moment,” she said drily.

“Ms. Hodges,” Crowley responded, leaning back on his heels casually. This was far from the most unprofessional position he’d been found in, after all. Aziraphale, on the other hand, had turned bright red. He never had been much of a one for public demonstrations. “Morning. Think I told you I’d be out today to check on some of the landscaping and have a word with you about some of the materials.”

“Perfect,” she said. “I’d been meaning to ring you and ask about the acoustics in studio C.” Crowley wasn’t looking forward to finding out what _that_was about, and didn’t ask. The longer he could put it off, the better.

Her eyes flicked towards Aziraphale again, and Crowley moved belatedly to make the introduction. “Oh, this is my husband, Aziraphale. Fancied a trip out to the country, so I brought him along. Figured you wouldn’t mind him wandering the grounds a bit while we work.”

Years of practice and his own longstanding immunity had allowed Crowley to spot the moment in which new acquaintances heard the angel’s name, started to question it, and were almost instantly soothed by the natural defenses he carried with him. Hodges was no exception, a tiny frown forming between her eyebrows for a bare moment before relaxing into unconcern.

“Welcome, gentlemen,” she said. “Can I offer you something? Tea, coffee?”

Aziraphale happily accepted tea before Crowley could decline for both of them, and they set off after the woman towards her office. Most of the building was still uninhabitable from the fire some years ago—ruins wouldn’t be too strong a word for much of it—but one corner had been haphazardly restored in the years since, and it was here that Hodges had set up her base of operations until the full rebuilding could be completed.

She guided them into the small sitting area and moved smoothly to put the kettle on and pour the water. Aziraphale accepted the mug that was pressed into his hands with a smile of thanks that dimmed only slightly as he caught the aroma rising from it. Crowley hid his own smirk, leaning back against the counter and idly discussing the plans for the gardens. He wasn’t so drawn in to the conversation that he missed the moment that Aziraphale tried a cautious sip, nor the expression, quickly hidden, that resulted.

A phone rang somewhere and Hodges slipped out. As soon as she was out of the room Aziraphale was openly staring in absolute consternation at his cup. “What is this?” he hissed.

Crowley smirked. “Tea, right?”

Aziraphale drew himself up in righteous indignation. “She may have called it that, but whatever is in this, it’s not tea.”

Crowley, who had made the mistake of accepting a cup on his own first visit, relented. Slightly. “I think it’s turmeric. Plus some herbs.” He sauntered over to the cabinet and pulled the box out, squinting at the list of ingredients down the side. “Yep. Turmeric, rosemary, ginger, licorice root, and black pepper.”

“But _why_?” Aziraphale looked desperately around the room, eyes catching on the large potted plant in the corner. He edged furtively over, tipping the contents of his cup in quickly as though he might be caught at any moment.

“Aren’t you supposed to appreciate hospitality?” Crowley drawled. Aziraphale shot him a dirty look. “Just be glad they’re not really open for business yet. Last time I was here she offered an ‘activated charcoal wellness shot’. I’m putting in a smoothie bar as requested, but I shudder to think what they’ll do with it.”

“I remember when cooking food was the most exciting innovation in human history, you know,” Aziraphale muttered peevishly. “Why every few decades they want to go back to eating it all raw, I’ll never understand.”

Culinary debates were cut short by footsteps announcing that they were no longer alone. Despite all indications, Crowley actually rather liked this client. This was largely because he had a rather strong sense that she was faking it as much as he was. Not the business itself—he was sure she was going to offer everything she claimed she was. He just didn’t think she _believed_in any of it, from the healing powers of herbal facial scrubs to the hydrotherapy pools or whatever fresh hell this soundbath thing was. No. For Crowley’s money, Mary Hodges was a business woman who had read an article about the importance of C-suite teams bonding over expensive spa treatments and had seized on the trend with all the rapacity of a shark sensing a new way to profit off of corporate credulity.

Aziraphale, not knowing any better, had asked her about the history of the property, and was now getting what was clearly a well-practiced spiel that Crowley had already heard several times. “A place of spiritual harmony,” was one of the phrases used to describe the old convent, as was “dedicated to wellness and peace.” The unfortunate fire was described in the briefest of terms, quickly followed up by sweeping language about rebirth and rising from the ashes, just as, of course, one could rise from the ashes of corporate burn-out to be rejuvenated as a self-actualized, spiritually awoken, freshly detoxed young executive ready to break through any glass ceilings that happened to present themselves. Or so Crowley assumed, at any rate; he’d rather extrapolated the last bit.

Aziraphale, predictably enough, had gently batted all of this aside and was trying to inquire about the real history of the building and grounds, something older than a few decades of use as a birthing hospital; Mary Hodges, it turned out, had no idea. He gave up quickly, lapsing into the little smile that Crowley adored, the one that looked polite but really concealed an impressive amount of judgement. This was followed by a polite line about how the weather was really so lovely, it was a shame to waste it, and perhaps he’d just take himself off and admire the gardens. Before Mary could even finish her equally polite reply he’d managed to disappear from the room.

Crowley gritted his teeth—no matter how much he privately admired the woman, that didn’t change the fact that the building she wanted was a nightmare—and dutifully turned to the issues of acoustics for the soundbath ceremony (he was damned, he thought, if he was actually going to learn what that _meant)_, options for renewable yet chic flooring for the meditation hall and guest rooms, and how well the landscaping “harmonized” with the addition of the infrared sauna. He stepped firmly on a tentative mention of an oxygen bar with the perfectly true excuse that it would take necessary space away from either the yoga deck or the space where she’d intended to put in the heated mud baths. He had to yield on the matter of adding separate temperature control to studio B for hot yoga, but at least that wouldn’t alter the blueprints themselves at this rather late date.

A steady determination to not to let this drag on any longer than necessary propelled them through the business fairly rapidly, and then Crowley managed to get rid of her with the excuse that he needed to do some sketching of the grounds so that he had a better record of where the mature trees that they were keeping were and how to work the design around them. 

He’d finished the exterior sketches and was wandering back through the hallways for some views out of the windows (or through the walls, in the most thoroughly destroyed parts), when he caught the sounds of a conversation coming from what had once been a room, now surrounded the remains of stone walls.

“You. Human.”

A shuffle of turning feet and then a gasp. “Oh our great lord Satan, it’s Master Ligur!”

That was definitely Hodges. The other voice was lower, an unfriendly growl that set the hairs on the back of Crowley’s neck standing on end. It wasn’t the otherworldly timbre of Michael’s voice, but something about it suggested that it was not, perhaps, entirely human.

“What did you do with him?” the voice demanded.

“With who?” Hodges asked. The fear was clearly audible in her voice. “I really don’t know who you’re talking about. I’m not one of the sisters anymore, you know, I left, and the whole convent was disbanded, it’s not like I just—”

“Enough,” the voice said flatly. There was a sound like a finger snapping. “Now. Where’s the baby, then?”

Hodge’s voice had a new, dreamy quality is as replied. “I don’t know. No babies here. Not since the fire. So many babies we had once, you know. Little and red and all wrapped up tight—”

As she reminisced, Crowley had edged around a bit further until he could catch a glimpse into the room through a missing chunk of wall. Hodges was standing with her back to him, giving him a clear view of her interrogator.

The only other demon that Crowley had seen wouldn’t have turned heads on a street in London, although admittedly there had been something a bit strange around the eyes. This one—Ligur, apparently, Crowley wasn’t going to append “Master” for anything—would not pass so unnoticed. The tightly buttoned black coat and gloves wouldn’t necessarily draw so many eyes, even in August, but the large orange lizard sitting on top of his head certainly would. Combined with his matching orange eyes and their distinctly _weird_pupils, and the figure was clearly not human.

“_The _baby.” The demon was clearly irritated. “Eleven years ago. I brought you a baby. What happened to it?”

“Oh!” Her voice took on a note of vague pleasure. “Our master’s son. We did as we were told. Swapped him with the son of the ambassador.”

The demon growled. “You didn’t. He’s not him. Just a human brat. What happened to the Antichrist?”

It was at this point that Crowley looked past the pair of figures and caught sight of Aziraphale standing in the hallway on the other side of the room, also looking through a missing piece of wall. He was already eyeing Mary and the demon with a rather frantic expression. He glanced back at Crowley and widened his eyes meaningfully, flicking them back to the other two.

Well, that was something. Crowley was supposed to come up with a plan for handling the situation now? Assuming that “handling” it didn’t just mean turning tail and heading back for London, what was he supposed to do? What did he know about thwarting demons?

Hodges’s voice, absently protesting that they’d swapped the babies just as intended, suddenly cut off with a tight little noise. The demon had backed her up against the wall that was hiding Aziraphale from their view and was holding her against it by a hand wrapped around their throat.

Aziraphale, unable to see them in their new position but clearly knowing that nothing good was happening, had resorted to frantic gestures in Crowley’s direction urging him into action. Without really letting himself think too much he held up a hand, motioning him to wait, and then slipped back a few steps into the hallway before coming back up it, letting his shoes scuff on the stone flooring as he did. “Ms. Hodges?” he called as he approached. He wished he could see what was going on. “Oh, there you are,” he said as he reached the gap he’d been peering through earlier, looking through it with his best attempt at a distracted expression.

The demon had dropped his hand from her throat at the sound of his approach, but still had her backed up to the wall, standing far too close. Crowley briefly fought temptation, and lost. “Sorry to break up an intimate moment,” he said breezily, sliding through the gap and sauntering into the room. “But I was having a look around, and I think I figured out how to keep the western deck and still save those trees you were worried about.”

Hodges looked at him with worryingly blank eyes. Worse, she didn’t make to move away, even as the demon had fallen back a half step and turned to stare at Crowley, who continued to blithely ignore him. “Come on, then,” he said in a chiding tone that would have been more at home in Aziraphale’s mouth than his. “I’ll need your approval to modify the blueprints, and we should take a look before the light goes. And I’m on billable hours, you know.”

That, finally, got her moving. One step away from the wall and then another, and the demon backing up before her, a vague frown on his face. Crowley stepped back to make sure Hodges was in front of him and urged her back towards the hallway where he’d come from, talking all the while about how much he knew she wanted to keep the mature trees and how moving a non-existent utilities closet would open up the few square feet they needed, if he could just show her what he meant. . .

The back of his neck crawled with the awareness that he’d turned it towards a demon, but he didn’t let himself turn back around. He wasn’t sure why his sudden appearance had been enough to make him back down, but so far it seemed to be working. Aziraphale was probably still lurking just behind the wall, anyway, and Crowley was fairly certain that he’d intervene if he were about to be disemboweled.

They’d barely made it a few steps when that trust was put to the test. There was a shuffle of feet turning to follow, and the low growl of the demon’s voice, now directed at Crowley. “Hey, you, wait up—”

Crowley pushed at Hodges, all but shoving her ahead of him. There was a white-gold glow blooming against the far wall, and he let himself relax slightly. Just as they reached the hall he chanced a glance back. He caught just a glimpse of the growing light, now almost blinding, and a flash of white feathers.

A voice boomed out behind them. “You! Demon!” It had all of the irritation that Aziraphale generally reserved for shoppers who left their trollies blocking the grocery store aisle, amplified to increase the effect.

The moment he’d stopped urging her on, Hodges had stopped, looking down the hall in the direction she’d been facing, face still weirdly blank. Crowley hissed in irritation and started shooing her down the hall. The farther away they were from the demon the better, as far as he was concerned.

They were still close enough to hear the demon’s voice as he replied. “An angel?” he rumbled. “You’re not supposed to be here. What’re you playing at?”

“Begone, foul creature! I don’t know what Hellish business brings you here, but you shall not, er, torment this poor woman any longer!”

It sounded like Aziraphale had it pretty much under control. Crowley kept hustling Hodges down the hallway until they had nearly the full length of the building between them and where the demon had been. She drifted to a stop again as soon as he stopped, but this time he figured it was probably the best he could get. He tucked them around a corner, out of sight of the main hallway, and waited.

It wasn’t very many minutes before he heard hurried footsteps and Aziraphale’s voice quietly calling his name. He popped his head back around the corner, not missing the relieved expression as the angel caught sight of him. “All clear?”

Aziraphale nodded. “Popped back off to Hell, I think. Pretty quick. Didn’t seem all that fussed about running into an angel, really, but at least he took himself off. You?"

“I’m fine.” Crowley shrugged. “Hodges seems a bit out of it.”

Aziraphale rounded the corner, ducking around to look into her eyes. He tutted. “Now, really. He didn’t have to do that.”

“Do what?”

Aziraphale ignored Crowley’s question to peer a bit more at Hodges. “Well. I suppose it’s already been done, now hasn’t it?”

“What has?”

“Can’t really make matters worse, I suppose,” Aziraphale went on, clearly to himself. “And it’s not like I started it. Ah, yes, hello there.” His tone had shifted to the heartier one he used when he had to muster some semblance of customer service. Hodges actually responded to it, looking up at him. “I don’t suppose you can help us out, can you? Now, er, the dem—other gentleman, that is—he said something about a baby?”

“Yes,” Hodges answered, in the same dreamy voice that she’d used when the demon was questioning her. “Such a lovely little baby boy.”

“Oh, _was _he,” Aziraphale said, evident fondness in his tone. Crowley elbowed him, jarring him back to business. “And where, er, did the baby come from?”

“Our Master’s son. The Adversary, the Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Prince of the World and Lord of Darkness.” She smiled faintly throughout the litany. Crowley, who would usually have told you that he rather enjoyed spooky, had to suppress a shiver. “Master Ligur delivered him.”

And that was a mental image to repress. Surely she didn’t mean _deliver _deliver. “And you traded him with the baby from the American Ambassador, is that right?” Aziraphale was asking.

“Yes. Such a charming man,” she said confidingly. “He used to be ambassador to Swinton!”

Aziraphale seemed content to let that pass by, but Crowley frowned. “That’s not right, angel,” he said quietly, not wanting to break whatever spell was going on here, but Hodges didn’t react. “There isn’t an ambassador to Swinton. ‘m pretty sure.”

That got a frown from the angel, but it didn’t linger. “She may not be the most reliable witness, dear,” he said. “Besides, according to the demon he isn’t actually the Antichrist, so clearly _something _went wrong.”

Crowley stared at him for a long moment, a thought gradually taking shape in his mind. The moment it came fully clear he rounded on Hodges. “Was there another baby?”

She nodded, eyes staring unfocused. “Of course. I switched them, and Sister Garrulous took the other baby away.”

“No, no, no!” Crowley turned to Aziraphale, words coming so quickly he could hardly get them out. “I saw the old blueprints. There used to be a whole birthing hospital here. Half a dozen rooms at least. What if—"

“There was another baby,” Aziraphale finished the sentence, eyes lighting. He turned back to Hodges. “Was there another family here that night? Who were they? Where were they from?”

“I don’t know,” Hodges said, her voice even vaguer than it had been. “I was just supposed to get the biscuits and entertain His Excellency.”

“That’s fine, not to worry,” Aziraphale said. “There must be records.”

“Oh, there were,” she said. “Lots and lots of records.”

“Well?” Aziraphale’s voice had acquired an edge that indicated that his patience was running low. “Where are they?”

Crowley, glancing at the ruined wall behind the angel, had a sinking feeling even before Hodges answered. “Lost. Burned in the fire.”

“Right,” Aziraphale said, voice tight. “Right. Well.” He turned to Crowley, brows pinched, lips pressed tightly together in thought. “I think perhaps we’ve learned as much as we can, here.”

Crowley couldn’t disagree. “I’m set.”

Aziraphale nodded and turned back to Hodges, tipping her chin up to meet his eyes. “Thank you, my dear. You will, er, awake having had a lovely dream about whatever you like best.” He snapped his fingers in front of her face and turned to go, tugging gently at Crowley’s elbow until he followed. He didn’t think Aziraphale would have just left her if she wasn’t going to be all right, anyway.

“Well, that was an encouraging development.” Aziraphale, as usual, seemed to mean it unironically, his tone bright as they picked their way out of the ruined building and across the grounds towards the drive where they’d left the Bentley.

“It was?” Crowley asked doubtfully. “No Antichrist, no idea where he is, no surviving records, just a former nun spouting Satanist propaganda—”

“Not at all,” Aziraphale said, serenely ignoring his tone. “We know the boy is out there, after all. We know when and where he was born. Now we just have to find him.”

“And then what?” Crowley demanded.

“And then what _what_?”

“Say we find the Antichrist. What the dev—what are we supposed to do with him when we do?”

Aziraphale shook his head dismissively. “We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.”

“Burn the—_cross _the bridge, angel, you mean—”

“Right now, neither Heaven nor Hell knows where he is.” Aziraphale paused in his steps and turned towards him, eyes sparking with unexpected intensity. “Heaven doesn’t even know he’s missing. If we can find him first, we can—” he waved a hand wildly, indicating their general surroundings. “Stop all this before it even gets a chance to start.”

“I—” Crowley couldn’t bring himself to argue against the new determination burning in Aziraphale’s eyes. “Fine. But you heard her yourself. How are we going to find him?”

Aziraphale, resuming their progress towards the car, responded with what was now a deeply familiar refrain. “I think we had better get home, my dear. I think, with the additional context, there may well be some useful information in my books.”

“Books again?” Crowley asked, and even Aziraphale seemed to notice the sarcasm this time. “Since they’ve done so much good so far. Think they’ll be able to work the Antichrist’s name, address and shoe size into the rhyming scheme, do you?”

Aziraphale sighed, giving the usual nod of thanks as Crowley opened his door, and waited until they were both settled and Crowley had the key in the ignition. “Do you have a better idea? Got one single better idea?”

Crowley couldn’t really think of anything to say.

**

“Would you just check—is that a _map_?” Crowley snapped, hearing rustling and glancing over to see Aziraphale struggling to manage the large and flimsy sheet.

Aziraphale ignored the question, tugging his glasses out of his pocket and scanning the map, squinting in the fading light. “So, you think that you missed—”

“We missed—”

“Yes, fine, _we _missed the turn for the motorway, which probably puts us—"

“For goodness sake, just use the damned phone—”

Aziraphale sniffed. “I’ve been using maps for centuries, my dear, I think I can manage—”

“The phone has a GPS, angel, it will tell us where we actually are.”

“Here!” Aziraphale said triumphantly, pressing a finger to the map. “It looks like if we continue on this road we’ll reach—”

“The village?” Crowley asked drily.

Aziraphale emerged from the map, blinking owlishly at the houses and gardens that had appeared on either side of the road. “Ah, you see, the map sufficed after all.”

“A bit late,” Crowley said, but without much bite. The street had narrowed and he’d been forced to slow down, less for fear of the close-set hedges but more for the thought of the fit Aziraphale would have if he bumped any of the pedestrians who were suddenly clogging the road. Apparently the whole village felt the need to turn out for an evening stroll. It was cloggingly twee, was what it was, Crowley thought viciously.

“I’m sure there’ll be a sign for the motorway shortly—” Aziraphale was saying, watching the passing village with an abstracted smile, until he made a short, sharp noise, suddenly stiffening.

“What?” Crowley snapped, turning to look at him. Nothing looked wrong, not that he could see—

“Stop the car,” Aziraphale said sharply. Crowley stepped hard on the break. The moment they’d stilled Aziraphale was fumbling for the handle and then was out, hurrying away up the road.

Crowley cursed steadily and loudly as he found a slightly wider spot and wedged the Bentley into it. Traffic could still get past, it would be fine. He slithered out and sauntered up the road in the direction Aziraphale had disappeared in.

It didn’t take long for him to catch up. The angel hadn’t gone far—in fact, he was stopped on the edge of what looked like the central square of the village, talking animatedly to a young woman. From behind Crowley could only make out a quantity of dark hair, partly put up, and a fuzzy green coat with a long, full skirt and over-large sleeves. As she moved a hand to gesture, he could see wide lace gathered at the cuff. She and Aziraphale made quite a pair, and Crowley couldn’t blame the older gentleman who gave a double-take and then a hard stare as he passed them.

“But you see, my dear, it’s of utmost importance—” Aziraphale was saying rather desperately.

“I don’t know who you are,” the girl was saying, rather frostily, “But it’s been in my family for a long time, and it’s not for sale.”

Aziraphale flicked a glance over his shoulder at the sound of footsteps and gave Crowley a relieved smile as he spotted them. “I’m sorry, my dear, I just need to speak to this young lady about her book—”

“A book?” Crowley asked incredulously. He could see, now, that the girl was clutching what looked like a very old book to her chest with both arms, glaring fiercely at Aziraphale as if suspecting he might try to take it by force. “We’re a little busy right now, angel, is this really time to go haring off after a first edition?”

“It’s not—” Aziraphale started, then stopped himself. He took Crowley’s elbow, turning them away as if that would stop the girl from hearing them. Crowley, watching over his shoulder, saw that it had rather the opposite effect—she’d started edging away when Aziraphale’s attention had shifted, but now, with the promise of a secret, she’d reversed course, sidling closer with stealth that Crowley couldn’t help but approve of.

“It’s not just any book,” Aziraphale hissed. “It’s the _Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch. _Do you have any idea how long I’ve been looking for a copy? There aren’t any. It doesn’t exist!”

Crowley, who had not unreasonably jumped to the conclusion that something was actually wrong when his husband had rapidly fled the car, tried to take a deep breath. It didn’t really work. “Even if it was the holy grail it wouldn’t matter in a few days. Can we try to focus?”

“No, no,” Aziraphale said, lowering his voice even more and bouncing slightly on his toes. In the corner of Crowley’s eye, the girl leaned closer, clearly still hoping to eavesdrop. “You don’t understand. It’s a book of prophecies. The only one that’s completely accurate. In every detail.”

Ah. Crowley huffed out a breath. “You sure about that, angel?”

“If we’re going to find the Antichrist, the answer is _in that book_,” Aziraphale said, absolute conviction in his voice. His eyes darted sideways at the girl, who hastily pretended she hadn’t been trying to listen. “I just need to figure out how to get a look at it.”

“Can’t you just—” Crowley waved his hand and mimed snapping his fingers in the same gesture Aziraphale had used on Hodges.

“Of course not!” Aziraphale gasped, clearly affronted. “I wouldn’t—that was a _demon_—” Crowley just stared, eyebrows raised dubiously, and he flushed. “It’s hardly a very angelic thing to do,” he said primly.

Crowley didn’t think that most of the angels he’d met so far would have shown any such compunctions, except inasmuch as it would deny them the opportunity to use brute force instead. Before he could voice this thought, however, the girl interrupted.

“You—what are you?” She was staring at Aziraphale, brows drawn together, eyes partially closed. “He’s—he’s normal enough,” she said, waving vaguely at Crowley, who halfheartedly considered taking offense. “But you—your aura. What _are _you?”

Aziraphale opened his mouth. Closed it. “Ah. Well. I’m really, well, quite a normal human. Yes. Of course I am!” he laughed nervously. “What else would I be?”

The situation seemed like it was rapidly degenerating, and if Aziraphale was right, they still had to get their hands on that book. And the older gentleman with the little dog had managed to find another excuse to walk past, squinting even more suspiciously than before. “Look,” Crowley said, a bit desperately, “Is there somewhere else we can talk?”

Even as they gingerly settled themselves onto the sofa in the modest living room of the cottage, the girl—Anathema, she’d said, with enough grim determination that Crowley had quashed any impulse to comment on the name—was still glaring at them suspiciously. She hadn’t been particularly keen to bring them back to her house, which was honestly pretty reasonable, but after staring for a long minute at their casually joined hands and mentioning several times that she had a breadknife close to hand, she’d extended the invitation and walked them back to it.

“So?” she demanded, standing in the doorway and staring at them. She’d removed the enormous green coat to reveal something black and lacy with a high collar that was, if anything, even weirder. “Talk.”

“Yes, well, my dear girl. We are, well. . . ” Apparently Aziraphale hadn’t used the walk over to devise a story. He looked rather imploringly at Crowley, who didn’t step in. “We just happened to be in the area, I suppose,” he said, rather weakly. “And when I happened to see that you had Agnes’s book, I just—”

Anathema was frowning. “You know who Agnes was.”

“Of course!” Aziraphale had the mildly offended tone he adopted whenever anyone seemed to doubt his expertise. “Agnes Nutter, witch. Born 1600, exploded 1656.” He looked hungrily at the book on the counter, just visible through the doorway into the kitchen. Anathema moved to block his line of sight, and he met her eyes instead. “I just—there _are_no copies of her book. I’ve been looking for, well, rather a long time, and never even a sniff. It’s dreadfully important, you see, that I find it. If there’s anything, anything at all that you want in return—”

“Agnes was my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother,” the girl said flatly. “The book’s been in my family since. It’s not for sale.”

“Yes, I quite understand, but I really would be happy to offer anything, really, no price is too high—”

“Why do you want the book so much?” she interrupted.

“I’m a bit of a collector,” Aziraphale said, then thought better of that tactic when it just earned him a glare. He tried another approach. “I’m working on a rather important and, er, urgent project. The book would help, I think. It’s the most accurate book of prophecies ever written, you know.”

“I know.” She was staring at him steadily. “What project? And you never answered my question. I’ve never seen an aura like yours. What are you?”

“I, er,” said Aziraphale, who clearly had no intention of sharing tonight.

“Look,” said Crowley, finally breaking in. “We—er, he—just needs to read the book. Right, ang—er, dear?”

“Well, some time to study—”

“But you don’t actually need the book itself, do you?”

Crowley watched the war between habitual avarice and the obvious practicalities behind Aziraphale’s eyes. “I, er, I suppose not,” he croaked eventually, clearly reluctant to make the concession.

Crowley rolled his eyes, but fondly. “So. Book girl. It’s a priceless family heirloom and all, but you’ve been carrying it around town with you, so it can’t be too fragile.” Hopefully she’d missed Aziraphale’s shudder at the words. “Let me make a copy and we’ll be on our way. No harm done, everyone happy.”

Anathema looked unconvinced, Aziraphale frankly skeptical. “Make a copy?” he asked. “By the time you could copy it over we’d be well past—anyway. It would take much too long.”

Crowley groaned. “Not by hand. With my phone. Easy enough to take a picture of every page.” It was a decently thick book, but the pages had looked fairly heavy, and he didn’t think it was that long. It would be an annoying chore, but hardly an insurmountable one.

Aziraphale was eyeing the phone in his hand with overt dislike. “If you think I’m going to read it on that miniaturized device of yours—”

“I’ll put it on the computer,” Crowley promised hurriedly. “Blow it up as large as you like. Print it out, if you insist, it’ll be just like the real thing.”

Aziraphale’s scowl said that it was clearly not at all like the real thing, but he didn’t voice a protest. It was Anathema who spoke. “You can’t just—” she paused, frowning at them and clearly searching for a reason to object. “And why should I let you? What’s in it for me?”

Crowley did not howl _the possibility that the world won’t end this week_, much as he wanted to. “You won’t have him—” he jerked his head at Aziraphale—“phoning you up to offer you increasingly extravagant prices for the book. Daily. Probably. Right, angel?” Aziraphale was trying to look like he’d never even consider such an ill-mannered move, but the affectation of innocence was rather marred by the avarice in his gaze as he tried to peer past the girl to see the book again.

The girl’s eyes narrowed at that. “What did you call him?” she asked sharply.

Damn. Now he’d done it. Maybe. Shouldn’t be too hard to play it off, really. “Angel. ‘s a pet name. ‘Cause he’s my husband.” He narrowed his eyes at her. “Got a problem with that?”

She rolled her eyes, not deigning to answer. She was still watching them too sharply for Crowley’s liking. She’d been going on about auras, earlier—Crowley had assumed it was bullshit, but was it possible that she was actually on to something about Aziraphale’s true nature.

Aziraphale had gone tense next to Crowley when she’d first asked, but it wasn’t audible in his voice as he started burbling happily, alternating between beaming at Crowley and down at his left hand as he did so. “Newlyweds, actually. Just this past week. A small, private ceremony, but we figured it was finally time to join the knot, as it were. It’s been a few years, you know, and I wasn’t sure he’d ever really want to make it official—"

Crowley shushed him, gesturing him to knock it off. Aziraphale stopped mid-sentence, turning faintly pink.

The girl’s expression hadn’t softened, and Crowley wasn’t sure she’d really bought it, but she still seemed to have come to some decision. “Fine. As long as it won’t take too long. I don’t have all day.”

Crowley smiled, nudging Aziraphale insistently with his elbow until he managed a more pleasant expression. “I’ll be as quick as I can,” he promised, fishing his phone out of his pocket and moving towards the kitchen.

Photographing each page of the book turned out to be, as he might have expected, a mind-numbing way to spend one of the few evenings left in the world. There was some amusement in listening to Aziraphale and the girl making very stilted conversation over tea in the living room, but that ended when Aziraphale came to bring his mug into the kitchen and caught sight of Crowley handling the apparently priceless book. He’d made great noises of consternation and promptly pulled out a pair of cotton gloves that Crowley was sure hadn’t been in his pocket a minute before. After that silence largely reined, Aziraphale carefully turning and holding each page as Crowley snapped a picture.

Despite the tedium it didn’t actually take all that long, as Crowley had expected. They thanked the girl—Aziraphale tersely, Crowley with his best attempt at a charming smile, and headed back to London as quickly as the Bentley could carry them. For once, Aziraphale didn’t even comment on the speed.

He hovered obnoxiously as Crowley booted up his laptop and downloaded the photos, sliding into the seat in front of it the moment Crowley had vacated it. He watched just long enough to see Aziraphale click on one of the photos, apparently at random, before drifting off to make a cup of coffee. Or find a glass of wine. One or the other, at least.

“Oh,” Aziraphale said quietly, and Crowley was instantly back at his side. “No wonder Miss Anathema changed her mind. She must have expected us, I think.” Aziraphale pointed at one of the paragraphs on the screen and Crowley bent over him to read it.

_When that the angel shall readeth the fascimily of these wordes of mine on Mr. Jobbe’s machine, the final days are certes upon us. Open thine eyes and read, I do say, for thou must know truly what is to comme. And for thy companion, do not let the foolish principalitee’s cocoa grow too cold._

“Oooh,” Aziraphale said, reading again as Crowley did. “I knew, but—”

Crowley had to admit that it was a bit uncanny. “Foolish principality, is it? Guess you’d better get to it, then,” he said. “I’ll get the milk on.”

**

Aziraphale didn’t move from his chair for nearly two days. He clicked through the images in turn. Occasionally he jotted down a note on the sheet of paper next to him. Crowley couldn’t make heads of tails of the symbols, and after he found his eyes watering when he tried, he avoided looking. Instead, only feeling mildly foolish, he called in sick to work and kept up a steady rotation of fresh cocoa, silently replacing the untouched mugs whenever they’d grown chilled, taking breaks only to nap fitfully, waking every couple of hours and repeating it all over again.

Matters came to a head on Saturday morning, when he realized that he’d emptied the tin entirely. Crowley briefly considered substituting tea instead, or simply giving up entirely—it wasn’t like Aziraphale was drinking them anyway—but the prophecy had been quite clear, and apparently he was just superstitious enough to listen to it.

Aziraphale favored a very particular (and expensive) cocoa, so it wasn’t as simple as a quick jaunt to the market down the block, but it still wouldn’t take Crowley too long to nip out for a bit. He made a fresh cup from the dust left in the tin, swapped it out with the old one on the desk, and headed out to the Bentley.

As reluctant as he’d been to leave, it was a relief to be out of the silent apartment. He lingered in the store a few minutes longer than he’d intended, picking out a few treats, mainly for Aziraphale, whenever he finished his study of the book, but also a couple of his own favorites.

Crowley’s good mood lasted most of the way home, up until he hit strangely slow traffic. It took twice as long as usual to drive the last few blocks. He grumbled to himself, a familiar refrain about how there was always some goddamn thing going on in Soho, and didn’t anyone appreciate that people actually lived here. There were sounds, too, that he could distantly make out over the music from his speakers.

But it was the scent that finally alerted him, as he finally reached the block before the bookshop. An acrid smell that swept through the car and had him glancing up at the face of the large white building across the way. He knew every detail of it, had sketched it and stared at the plans and seen it every day of the past four years. Now those familiar details were masked, hidden by the large plume of black smoke that swept across the front of the building. Below, the glass panels shone blue with the reflections of the flashing lights.

Crowley wasn’t thinking, not anything, not a single thought in his head as he braked sharply to stop the car just short of the trucks that blocked the road, as he dodged around the barriers and the shouting figures until he was standing on the corner. Until he could see it for himself.

The bookshop was in flames.


	8. Chapter 8

Crowley slumped in the little plastic chair, staring down at his styrofoam cup of tepid tea. He didn’t want it, but it was apparently part of the standard package for comforting traumatized civilians, so here he sat. Tea in hand.

Everyone had been quick to assure him that he wasn’t being brought to the station because of any suspected malfeasance. There were just questions that needed more official answers than the shouted exchange outside the shop with the police who had held him back from the burning building. Was he the owner? Had the business been open? Did anyone live there? Was anyone in there at the time? Who? Was he completely sure that his husband had been home?

Of course he'd been home. It was impossible to imagine that Aziraphale had shaken off his two days of immobility and wandered off to the shops just in time to miss the fire. Crowley offered the officer a mildly sanitized version of events. Yes, when he’d left his husband had been reading quietly in his study, with no plans to go out. No, Crowley hadn’t been gone long, but it was possible that Aziraphale had fallen asleep in the meantime, although he thought it unlikely. Yes, if he had that could be why he hadn’t gotten out when the fire had started. No, he didn’t know for sure that he’d still been there, couldn’t they see if. . .

Unfortunately, Mr. Crowley, they didn’t know anything for certain yet. The fire was only barely out, pockets still smoking, after all. It would be some time, tomorrow at the soonest, before they’d be able to enter the structure. Longer before there was any likelihood of recovering any remains.

Every face around him was reserved, downcast, compassionate. They spoke to him in careful tones, offered him a flimsy blanket to wrap around shoulders that had somehow gotten soaked by spray from a firehose. They were, of course, so sorry about the loss of his home, and the probable. . . There, they petered off into silence, unwilling to either condemn without evidence or offer hope that they all knew to be false. Did he have anyone who he could call, anywhere he could stay and not be alone?

Crowley, temporarily left alone with his blanket, stared at the murky surface of his tea, considering the word _discorporation_. Five years should have been plenty of time to ask about it. The important questions, the ones he needed answers to now. What happened, precisely, when an angel was discorporated? Would he come back to Earth? How long would that take, did it hurt when it happened, would he have the same body when he came returned, would Crowley even recognize him. What happened if the world ended first.

How did one tell hellfire from a run-of-the-mill inferno? What signs pointed to the difference between _it’s just a body _and _lost forever_?

Crowley knew with absolute certainty that Aziraphale was gone. The angel’s love for the building had been enough to keep it pristine for two hundred years merely with his presence. No force on Earth would have been enough to keep him from saving it as it burned. He was, therefore, clearly somewhere else. Whether he was discorporated, or. Well. Either way, he was gone.

It was particularly surprising, then, when Crowley looked up and saw Aziraphale’s face. The expression was heart-stoppingly familiar, a pinched and worried look that softened into a smile as he met Crowley’s eyes. His expression was warm but focused, about to speak. Crowley couldn’t help but lean forward, caught up in it. He knew perfectly well what it was—or, rather, wasn’t. What it was was his own reflection in a powered-down computer monitor on the opposite desk, overlaid with grief and his own blasted imagination until it was instead a face he could have drawn perfectly from memory. What it _wasn’t _was his husband.

No matter the bleak rationality that he forced his thoughts into, dismissing the hallucination as thoroughly as he could, even the memory of the imaginary vision of Aziraphale was too painful. Needing some distraction to banish the image from his mind he reached for his phone, stabbing almost blindly at it. He landed in his photos, staring blankly down at a random page from that thrice-damned book. Eventually his eye caught on a pair of words that struck something in his brain. He looked at them for a long moment, remembering an angelic voice and a perfect moment standing in a meadow, before he dragged his eyes up the paragraph and forced them to read it from the beginning. 

_Tho fire burns, do not despair. A foenix returnes from the ashes, and two shall walk together unto the very end that draws nigh. And neither flamme nor winde nor laws of heaven itself shalle devyde, for they shall become one flesh._

“Ooooh,” a voice said. Very, very close at hand.

An officer working at a nearby desk looked up at that. “Sorry, did you say something, Mr. Crowley?”

“No,” Crowley said. He looked back up at the blank monitor across the way. Aziraphale’s eyes met his, crinkling into a smile. He fluttered a little wave at him. Crowley glanced down at his own hands, still clasped around his phone. “No, I didn’t.”

The officer turned back to her work and Crowley made a beeline for the tiny bathroom he’d noticed near the back stairs, locking the door behind him. It seemed the best place to have either a conversation with the spirit of his dead—discorporated—husband or a complete psychotic break, which appeared to be the two options at the moment.

He braced himself against the sink, staring down into it for a long moment before gathering up all his courage and looking straight into the mirror.

Aziraphale’s expression had changed to one of mild concern. Crowley stared. Aziraphale’s frown deepened.

“What—” Crowley managed, glad that he had the sink to help support him, as his legs didn’t seem to be quite up to the task.

“I’m so happy I managed to find you, my dear.” The voice came from his own mouth, but it wasn’t his. It wasn’t quite Aziraphale’s, either, but something that was perhaps somewhere between the two. “It’s not as easy to navigate like this as I thought it might be.”

“What,” Crowley tried again. This time it came out in his own voice. He still wasn’t sure which of the two options this actually was. This seemed an unlikely hallucination for his grieving brain to produce, but it wasn’t really any more probable that Aziraphale was, somehow, both in his head and in the mirror in front of him.

“I’m afraid there was something of an accident,” Aziraphale said. His image in the mirror spoke as he did, Crowley noticed, complete with fluttering movements of his hands.

Crowley looked down to double-check and saw that his own were indeed still clutching the edges of the sink. “Yeah, no kidding,” he muttered.

“I’ve been a bit discorporated,” Aziraphale went on. There was no particular sensation as they swapped control of his mouth, which actually made it even weirder, Crowley thought, than if there had been. “Needed a body if I’m going to be able to _do _anything down here. Had a few false starts—found a couple of psychics and a faith healer. Bounced around a little bit, just hoped I’d manage to find you before I had to intrude on too many others.” Aziraphale frowned. “There are some quite odd people out there, you know.”

Crowley just stared at the mirror. “Yeah, I know, angel.”

Aziraphale smiled at him again. “Wasn’t quite what I had in mind for today, I admit, but needs must, and all. You don’t mind too terribly, do you?”

Crowley made a few involuntary noises before he managed to get his mouth and his brain lined up in the same direction. “Hnng? Mind?”

“If I possess you. For the time being, at least.” Aziraphale’s voice was cheerful, verging on manic in a way that Crowley, had he had more of his wits about him, would have recognized as a sign that things were not as ok as the angel was pretending they were. For the moment, though, it was still all he could do not to fall apart himself. “Normally I wouldn’t dream of just dropping in uninvited, but I hardly figured you would object too strongly.”

“Nnnh. I mean, no, of course not, angel. You’re, um, welcome any time. My corpus is your corpus, and all that.” The face in the mirror beamed at him, and Crowley let himself bask in it, a few of the muscles in his shoulders that had been wound almost to the breaking point relaxing minutely. He decided, quite decisively, that he would accept this at face value. Being an angel was different from being human, after all, and who was he to say whether that included the ability to possess people? And if it weren’t real, well. There were probably worse coping mechanisms than imagining that you were possessed. Plenty of fairly sane people said they had imaginary conversations with people they’d lost, after all. This was only a mildly more extreme version. “’Sides, it’s not like it’s the first time you’ve been inside me.”

“Excellent,” Aziraphale said, not deigning to acknowledge the afterthought. “It was all a bit of an experiment, so I’m rather glad it worked. What Gabriel would say if he—well.”

Crowley had plenty of questions to ask about that, even though he suspected the answers were ones he very much did not want to hear, about Aziraphale taking insane risks with something he _didn’t even know would work_, but he was distracted quite effectively as one of his hands let go of the edge of the sink and raised itself in front of his face, flexing its fingers slightly. He stared at it, not quite sure how to react.

“Ah, good,” Aziraphale said out of his mouth, sounding immensely satisfied. “Been in my old corporation so long, I got rather used to it. Bit odd, using someone else’s, but it could be useful in a pinch. And now I think we’d best get moving, we can’t hang about—” Here he paused. Crowley’s other hand let go of the sink and his—their, it wasn’t his when it was doing things he hadn’t told it to do—body straightened gingerly, turning to look around the slightly dingy little bathroom. “Wherever we are. Where are we?”

“Police station,” Crowley said, throat suddenly almost dry to speak.

Aziraphale looked abruptly worried. “Police? Dearest, why ever were you at a police station? What’s wrong? There hasn’t been some kind of trouble, has there?”

“I—” Crowley really, really didn’t want to say it. “Nah. It’s kind of a long story. . .”

“You’ll have to tell me later, then. We have places to be, after all.”

Crowley closed his eyes, trying to gather his thoughts. There had been rather too many entirely unexpected twists to this conversation so far, and he was feeling a little dizzy. “Where?” he managed.

“Ah, yes. Well. I figured it out, you see. Armageddon. Where and when. It was all in the book, you know.”

That succeeded in catching Crowley’s attention. “Well?”

“Tadfield. The airbase. That’s where it’s all going to happen. And quite soon now, I’m afraid. So we’d best be getting a wiggle on.”

“I can’t believe you seriously—”

“We have to at least try to do something,” Aziraphale said, interrupting him just as easily as he usually did, even if he had to take over their mouth to do it. “Can’t just let it all happen.”

“No, I mean, I know,” Crowley said. “It was the getting a _wiggle _on—”

“Honestly.” Aziraphale was smiling at him, though, and there was warmth in the borrowed voice. “Do find us a way out of here, dear.”

It wasn’t hard, in the end. Crowley had answered all their questions, after all, and suspected that by now he’d transitioned from Person We Needed to Talk To to Inconvenient Reminder of Tragedy, and they were probably just as happy to have him gone. When they slipped out of the bathroom, it was to find that everyone on the floor was clustered around a TV screen at the far end, all focused on something that Crowley couldn’t see for all the bodies. Nobody even saw them as they made for the back stairs and out the building.

The first hiccup came when they reached the street. Crowley’s memories of the minutes after he’d arrived at the burning bookshop were fragmented, but he could pull out a distinct memory of watching tensely as a young officer carefully maneuvered the Bentley into the closest parking space and then being gently ushered into a sedan to be carried off to the station.

“Car’s not here,” he said, hesitating momentarily. Lingering would only attract attention, though, and there were plenty of reasons why that would be a bad idea. He picked a direction at random to walk until they had a new plan.

This would have been fine, had Aziraphale not apparently had the same thought, albeit with a different route in mind. Their legs tried to go different directions, then switched, before jointly coming to the consensus that the only viable option was _down_. They ended up in a heap on the pavement, Crowley increasingly aware that his plan to go unnoticed had not been as successful as he had wished.

“Maybe you should let me drive,” he said, with what he thought was impressive restraint, under the circumstances.

Aziraphale made a grumbling noise, but didn’t argue. A passing pedestrian eyed them and altered her path to give them an even wider berth. Crowley groaned internally and managed to hoist them to their feet, turning to head in the direction that he’d originally intended.

“The other way,” Aziraphale hissed, under his breath. “The parking garage.”

Crowley gritted their teeth. “Why?”

“If the Bentley isn’t here, we’ll need another car.” Aziraphale said, sounding entirely reasonable.

Crowley turned to go the way Aziraphale wanted, although it was more out of fear of an attempted take-over and repeat of the previous disaster if he didn’t. “I don’t think they’ll just give us one if we ask nicely.”

“That’s fine.”

Crowley sputtered a series of noises. He tried to stop walking, but their legs kept going on without him, and he scrambled to catch up. “Your plan is to steal a car?”

“Precisely.” Now, even worse than the reasonable tones of earlier, Aziraphale’s voice had the touch of excitement familiar from every time he’d gotten to try something he’d always secretly wondered about. “I’ve seen it done often enough, I’m quite sure I can manage to, er, _hotwire _it.”

Crowley wondered for a vicious moment why he’d ever felt so incredibly, impossibly relieved when he’d seen Aziraphale’s face in the mirror. At least he was increasingly convinced that this wasn’t an elaborate hallucination. “If you get me—us—arrested, angel—”

“Tosh,” Aziraphale said, in tones of barely suppressed glee. “I’ll do nothing of the kind.”

They made it into the garage without attracting any particular attention, a state of affairs that Crowley would have called miraculous, except that he didn’t think Aziraphale had actually had anything to do with it. He managed to steer the angel away from the first car that caught his eye, a silver Asbo that practically screamed “undercover cop”, and towards a grey BMW that seemed at least somewhat less likely to belong to an officer, and coincidentally looked like rather more fun to drive.

“I think it might be best to do this the human way,” Aziraphale said excitedly as they approached. “Less traceable by occult or ethereal forces. Just in case, you know.” He followed the remark by casually opening the door that Crowley was certain had been locked a moment before, apparently too used to letting himself in and out of the Bentley as he pleased to realize that he’d already broken his decree. Crowley had to swallow against the great and sudden lump in his throat at the overwhelming wave of fondness and chill memory of loss that swept over him.

Aziraphale apparently felt it—of course he did, it was his throat too, for the moment—their hands pausing where they were fumbling under the ignition. “Dearest? Is something the matter?”

“Nothing,” Crowley said hastily, clearing his throat when the word came out roughly. “I’m just—it’s nothing. Keep going, you’re doing great.”

Aziraphale hummed, clearly unconvinced, but turned his attention back to his work, making a satisfied little noise as the panel came free. He fiddled around some more and pulled out a bundle of wires. Crowley made a sound of alarm. “Don’t touch those, angel, some of them could be live—”

“Of course I won’t,” Aziraphale said with a sniff, waving his hands dismissively. “I learned basic electrical safety before you were even born, I should hope I know not to touch bare wires—”

He stopped as Crowley abruptly jerked their other arm off their lap. They both looked for a minute at the arc that the ends of the wires had just travelled as Aziraphale had gestured with them, right though the space where their arm had been. “Right,” Crowley said. “Maybe you should just focus on what you’re doing.”

Aziraphale didn’t dignify that with a response, busying himself with pulling back the rubber insulation so he could see what he was doing. He picked two of the wires, as far as Crowley could tell at random, and took one in each hand. He held their breath and tapped the ends together. The engine made a momentary noise and he jumped, pulling their hands apart. The engine died. Before Crowley could say anything sarcastic he repeated the gesture, this time holding steady for a second as the noise of the engine grew before releasing the wires.

The BMW was rather startled to find itself starting up under following the brief contact between a wire that connected the convenient volume buttons on the steering wheel to the sound system and another that served the alarm system, and in the complete absence of the proper transponder chip. But, obedient to the clear expectations emanating from the driver’s seat, it quietly released the steering lock and let the engine respond with a cheerful hum.

Crowley restrained himself from a fond eyeroll only by the knowledge that Aziraphale would be sure to feel it. After the day they’d had and what was apparently still to come, the least the angel deserved was his moment of triumph. “Well done,” he said instead. “But I think you’d better let me, ah, drive now.” He smirked, resisting the offended expression that Aziraphale was trying for instead, hurrying to back out of the space in the hope that fretting about his driving would preempt the otherwise inevitable lecture about puns being the lowest form of wit.

It didn’t take long for them to get out of the garage—still unnoticed, and now Crowley wasn’t sure he’d hesitate to call that a miracle—and out into London traffic, heading for the motorway that would take them to Tadfield.

“At least we needn’t take the time to run back to the shop,” Aziraphale was saying cheerfully. “Awfully clever of you, to have it all on your phone.”

Crowley needed to tell him. He _needed _to, but he couldn’t find the words, couldn’t find any words, so he settled for humming a noncommittal response, hoping that Aziraphale would assume that he was focusing on the road. The body’s responses betrayed him again, though—the very thought driving his heart-rate up, the sick feeling of dread pooling in his stomach. And, of course, it didn’t go unnoticed.

“My dear,” Aziraphale started, sounding anxious. “What’s worrying you so?”

“It’s nothing.”

“Crowley.”

“Nothing that matters right now.”

Aziraphale hummed severely. Crowley, desperately hoping to turn the discussion, decided that the best defense was a good offense. “Just thinking that it couldn’t really have been that hard for you to find a, heh, _receptive _body.”

“Crowley.”

“Honestly, angel, I’m just glad that you came back to me instead of looking for a better offer.”

“Must you, dear?”

Time for another subject change. “What the bloody hell happened to you, anyway? How did you manage to go from reading quietly in the bookshop to disembodied roaming of the globe?”

Before they’d even made it out of the garage Crowley had adjusted the mirror, shifting it so that rather than the back window, it gave him a view of what would have been his own face, under normal circumstances. It didn’t show him much of Aziraphale, just a slice of his eyes and the bridge of his nose, but it was enough to see the wince the question earned him.

“Archangels,” he said succinctly. “Apparently they figured out a way to, er, _hack_into the circle in the shop. I should have gotten rid of it years ago, but I thought possibly in an emergency. . . Well. I’d just gotten off the telephone when Uriel and Sandalphon showed up and told me in no uncertain terms that attempting to interfere was futile and that they’d been sent along to make sure I stopped involving myself in thwarting was, in fact, the Divine Plan. Which rather undermined their previous point, but they didn’t seem to care too much.”

“But, wait a minute,” Crowley said, trying to keep up. “How did they even know that you were still after the Antichrist?"

In the mirror, Aziraphale’s eyes went cool. “They’re consorting,” he said huffily, “With demons.”

Crowley frowned. “That seems. . . unlikely.”

“You’d like to think so, wouldn’t you.” Aziraphale’s irritation was plain. “But apparently the reason the demon Ligur wasn’t worried about seeing an angel at the old convent was because he’s on rather cozy terms with them, not to put it too finely.”

“Ah.”

“Rang Michael right up, I gather, and mentioned seeing me there. She apparently decided to tie up loose ends.”

“Tie up? ” Crowley wasn’t sure he wanted to hear the answer, but he was equally sure that he had to know.

Aziraphale sniffed. “Rather literally their intention, I think. Take me back to Heaven, detain me there until it was over. I didn’t, er, go quietly. There was something of a scuffle. Unfortunately, Uriel shoved—that is, I ended up in the circle without the proper preparations. Hence the discorporation.”

Crowley shoved all the questions he had about _that _to the side in order to make a mental note to stop shoving questions aside. There were clearly far too many things he didn’t know, even now. What was this circle in the bookshop that Aziraphale was talking about, for starters.

“I suppose it’s too much to hope that they tidied up a bit before they followed me up,” Aziraphale was saying fretfully. “We—they, really—knocked some things about, and I just hate to think of any of the spines on the books getting damaged if they got left open or anything.”

That was enough conversation for the moment, Crowley decided, reaching blindly to find a CD and slip it into the player. Whatever it was—and he knew what it would be, he was kidding himself if he pretended it ever varied—it would be better than silence. The next few minutes went fairly peacefully, aside from a brief squabble when Aziraphale went to turn the volume down and Crowley had to get quite firm about not taking over even just a little bit of the body while he was driving. Aziraphale pouted momentarily over that, but brightened again as soon as Crowley nudged the dial himself, quieting it slightly.

Crowley’s equanimity was briefly threatened again some ways down the motorway by a brief pattering of what Aziraphale assured him, with unexpected confidence, were a mixture of haddock and plaice. The shower was short-lived, though, and Crowley could at least be glad that it wasn’t the roof of the Bentley that was being dented by sealife.

They were well out of the London traffic by now, speeding towards Tadfield as fast as Crowley could take them. He wasn’t sure precisely how much time they had, but the tension in Aziraphale’s eyes when he glanced up to look at him and the silent encouragement to rather recklessly ignore traffic laws suggested that it couldn’t be much. The sun had disappeared behind the trees before they reached the exit for the village, and the sky overhead was turning first a faint pink and then an ever deeper red by the time they reached the cleared strip of land in front of the chain-link fence that demarcated the edge of the airbase.

Crowley stopped some distance before the gate, eyeing the fence. “Well? What now, angel?”

“I should imagine we need to get inside,” Aziraphale answered. They exited the car rather cautiously. A large young man who looked armed to the teeth emerged from the booth by the gate, demanding to know their names and business there before they’d taken so much as a step forward.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale hissed.

“What am I supposed to do?” Crowley demanded. “I’m not the one who can just—” he snapped his fingers for emphasis.

“I can’t go around enthralling random humans,” Aziraphale protested. “I’m not a _demon_.”

“Well, neither am I. Just supposed to do all your dirty work anyway, am I?”

Aziraphale huffed, then pasted on a stiff smile that felt particularly odd on Crowley’s face and turned them towards the soldier, who was now staring openly at them. “Good afternoon. We have some rather pressing business that is, I’m afraid, inside your little compound here. If you could just do us the favor of letting us by, that would be perfectly lovely. I promise, we won’t be any trouble, and we’ll be out of your hair in a jiffy.”

“‘in a jiffy,’” Crowley said sarcastically, unable to help himself. “Really? That’s what you’re going with.”

Aziraphale gave an exasperated huff, clearly intending an offended reply, but he was interrupted. “Gentlemen—Sir—You need to leave. Now.” The young man’s voice was getting even more tense, and he’d started cradling his gun in what looked to Crowley like a much more deliberate way.

“Aziraphale,” Crowley said.

“I’m afraid we can’t do that,” Aziraphale said, still in his infuriatingly reasonable voice. “It’s really terribly important that we get in.”

“Aziraphale,” Crowley said, more urgently. Any further words dried up in his mouth as the gun, which he’d been keeping a pretty careful eye on, was suddenly reduced to a black hole, pointed directly at them. “He’s got a gun—”

Aziraphale, about to reply, was momentarily distracted by a surge of _something _from beyond the fence that even Crowley could feel. He glanced over, although they couldn’t see anything past the lurking bunkers, staring for a long moment.

“I don’t know what’s going on here today, but you need to leave,” the soldier was barking. “Now. Or I will regretfully have to—”

Aziraphale came back to himself. “We really must get in now,” he said, turning back. The moment he saw the soldier he stiffened. “There’ll be none of that now,” he said sharply, and snapped their fingers.

The soldier was gone. Crowley stared at the spot where he’d been standing. He hadn’t felt anything when Aziraphale performed the miracle, but it was clear that something had happened. “I—what just happened?”

Aziraphale sniffed. “People should know better than to point guns at you. Still, I hope I haven’t sent him anywhere too unpleasant.” He gestured again, and the gate began to roll open. “We should be getting on.”

They set off along the pavement, Aziraphale apparently navigating them by instinct as much as anything. Another flare of whatever-it-was had him hurrying their steps into an unfamiliar jog. They burst around the next bunker to see a few figures standing in a cluster. Beyond them were a number of soldiers, scattered across the ground, motionless. Of those standing, two were tall, one wearing black leathers one in dark robes; facing them were four much shorter figures, plus a small dog.

One of the smaller figures bent and picked up something from the ground that glowed brightly in their hands. Aziraphale said a word that Crowley had never heard him say before, moving more quickly to close the distance. They were still just too far away to make out the words that the kid holding the object—which looked, Crowley thought with a shudder, to be on fire—said loudly. Whatever they were, they seemed to have the effect of magic trick, as the adult in the leathers abruptly flared and then vanished. The same eerie sensation as before washed over them, stronger for the proximity.

“What the hell is going on?” Crowley demanded quietly, and then reconsidered his choice of words.

“The end of the world.” Aziraphale hissed, as they closed the last few steps to the little cluster. “It’s close, now, but we can’t let him finish the job.”

Then they were close enough to attract the attention of the kids, who all turned to look at them. “Who’re you, then?” asked the one in red—a girl, Crowley realized, and so presumably not the one they had to worry about. “Are you another one of them?”

“Do forgive the interruption,” Aziraphale said, gently sidling closer. “If we could just pause matters for a moment. . . “

TAKE YOUR TIME, the robed figure said. Or, at least, Crowley heard. The words didn’t seem to have so much been soundwaves to be interpreted by his ears as much as they’d arrived in his brain already fully formed. I’M NOT GOING ANYWHERE.

Aziraphale shuddered faintly at the words but didn’t turn, instead eyeing the line of children. “Which one do you think he is, then?”

Crowley, startled, took control just long enough to answer. “Which one—how the hell should I know?”

Aziraphale fluttered their hands nervously. “He’s protected against ethereal interferences. I can’t detect him. But you’re human, I thought you might be able to sense something, I don’t know. Not Good.”

“It’s the bloody end of the world,” Crowley hissed. “Nothing’s good.”

Aziraphale eyed the children again, apparently steeling himself. Crowley felt their pulse quicken even further as Aziraphale took them a few steps closer, and wished he knew exactly what the angel was thinking. The two closest children edged away, which under the circumstances Crowley thought was quite reasonable. “Well,” Aziraphale said, trying a smile that even Crowley, unable to see it, could tell was horrifically awkward. “So, which of you fine young people is Adam Young?”

Three of them turned to look at the other one, who was watching them with brilliant grey eyes that seemed to see rather more than was actually there. Despite his sarcastic reply to Aziraphale’s query, there was in fact an air to the boy that was even more unsettling than their general surroundings, although Crowley would have found it hard to classify it as anything as precise as Not Good.

“I am,” the boy said.

“I’m terribly sorry about this, then,” Aziraphale said, and drew a sword out of thin air. At the same moment he clamped down hard on Crowley, cutting him off from taking control of the body. The vast strength of him, which Crowley had only glimpsed before now, squeezed down stiflingly around him, immense and impenetrable.

But strength wasn’t the only game in town. Crowley wriggled desperately in that implacable grasp, and somehow managed to slip lose enough to seize control of their voice, although he couldn’t manage any more. “Aziraphale!” he shouted. “What are you—he’s a kid! You can’t—”

“I’m sorry,” Aziraphale said again, taking control back without even appearing to struggle for it. Their voice trembled as he spoke, but the hand holding the sword was steady. “I don’t want to. But it’s the only way to save everyone. Him or—or the world. And I’ll do it,” he said, almost to himself. “Me, not you. Don’t want—don’t want that on your soul.”

_Aziraphale! _Crowley howled, but without a voice no one could hear, not even the other person in his head. _Angel, stop, you don’t have to do this. There’s another way, there’s got to be another way, you don’t have to kill him—_

The other children had, unsurprisingly, backed quickly if uncertainly away from Aziraphale’s advance, their clear desire to support their friend weaker than their instinct to avoid the strange adult with a weapon. Crowley approved. Adam, though, hadn’t moved, just watching Aziraphale approach with those piercing grey eyes, no sign of fear on his face.

They were almost within striking distance now, and Crowley could feel the muscles of their arms and shoulders tightening, about to move with all the force that a Heavenly warrior could produce. He could feel his last chance slipping away, and he grabbed for it, desperately.

Somehow, barely, he managed to slip through Aziraphale’s reluctance—so strong that he could almost taste it, although the angel showed no signs of letting it stop him—to take control again. He halted their arms, poised at the top of the swing. Their eyes stared at the sword for a moment and then, before Aziraphale could step back in, Crowley let their arm fall and flicked their hand, sending the sword sliding away across the pavement.

Almost before he’d finished the movement, Aziraphale had taken the body back, and it was his eyes that followed the movement of the sword as it came to rest, far out of reach. “Crowley,” he said, and Crowley could feel his despair in the pit of their stomach, the thick feeling in their throat, the sting that he was blinking out of their eyes. “I have to—”

“I’m not going to let them do it, you know.” Adam’s voice interrupted whatever Aziraphale had been about to say. He still seemed calm, unphased by his near execution at an angel’s hand. “My friends already got rid of three of them, and I’m about to deal with him.” He jerked his head at the massive black-robed figure.

The robed figure looked on, as impassively as ever. The boy took a few steps closer, looking up. Whatever was under the hood, he didn’t shudder as he saw it. “Your friends are gone,” he said simply. “It’s all stopping now.”

WE CANNOT BE STOPPED.

“You are now,” the boy insisted.

FOR THE MOMENT. BUT WE ARE NEVER TRULY GONE. HUMANITY DREAMED OF US, AND WE WERE. AS LONG AS YOU EXIST, WE WILL BE THERE. WITHOUT US, YOU WOULD NOT BE.

Adam shrugged. “Fine,” he said. “But no more ending the world. Not today. And not tomorrow, either. Ok?”

The figure inclined its head. ANOTHER TIME, he said. And then there was darkness, and an expanse of black wings the color of oblivion, edged with the blue of infinity. They swept through the air once, and then he was gone.

“See?” Adam said, looking back over his shoulder at Aziraphale and Crowley. “I said it was ok.”

“Actually,” one of the other kids said, “We were trying to stop them from ending the world.”

“Adam’s already on your side,” said the girl. “So I don’t see why you thought you needed to kill him. Violence is the last refuge of refuge of the incompetent, my mother says.”

“I’m sorry,” Aziraphale breathed. “I didn’t want—”

“I know,” Adam said, watching them closely. “You were just trying to help. But I still don’t think you should go around threatening people with swords.”

Any further discussion was halted by the rather noisy arrival of two new people who came piling out of the bunker behind them. All of them turned to see, Aziraphale starting to shift their weight in a way that suggested he was thinking of going for the sword. After a moment, though, Crowley recognized one of them. “Oi! Book girl!” he hailed her. “What’re you doing here?”

She quickly covered her surprise at seeing him. “So you _were_trying to stop Armageddon,” she said triumphantly. “I thought Agnes wanted you here.” She looked more closely at them, squinting. “But what on earth—”

“Hullo, Anathema,” Adam said. “You stopped them from blowing up the world, right?”

She gave a sidelong look at the young man who’d trailed out behind her. “My boyfriend actually did the tricky part.”

“Brilliant,” Adam said, with clear approval.

“If I might just interrupt,” Aziraphale said, earning another look from Anathema, who frowned heavily at them in puzzlement. Apparently she wasn’t sure what to make of their aura at present. Crowley didn’t suppose he could blame her. “Well done all round, but I’m not entirely sure that’ll be the end of it. You see, there’s supposed to be another war starting right about now—”

He was cut off by a flash of lighting that struck the ground about twenty feet away and stayed there, a figure taking shape in its depths. A scarce moment later a flare of fire grew out of the ground, another figure rising with it. Crowley was disappointed, although hardly shocked, to recognize the first as Gabriel. Although he couldn’t make a precise identification of the second, who was shorter and dressed in black with a showy red sash, it wasn’t hard to guess her general affiliation.

“Think there’s one for each shoulder?” he murmured. Aziraphale took over their eyes just long enough to roll them in response.

“You there,” Gabriel said, striding in their direction. “Antichrist. Just what’s going on?"

“What’zzz the hold-up?” the demon asked, voice buzzing with a resonance that gave Crowley an instant headache. “The war was suppozzed to start zzzeveral minutezzz ago.”

“We stopped it,” Adam said simply. “Me and my friends and Anathema and her friend.” Crowley supposed that not being brought to the demon’s attention was for the best, but it still seemed a little unappreciative not to even acknowledge the lengths they’d gone to get here. On the other hand, given what Aziraphale had apparently intended their role to be, perhaps it would be best to let it be forgotten.

Gabriel was staring at the boy in frank disbelief that rapidly shifted into impatience, poorly hidden. “Unacceptable. Armageddon must, well, re-start. Immediately.”

“Why?” Adam asked them, looking unimpressed.

Gabriel attempted a smile, although it wasn’t particularly convincing. “It’s the Great Plan. The entire point of the creation of Earth. If there isn’t a war, what’s it all been for anyway?”

“Now, Adam,” Aziraphale said quietly. “You don’t need to do anything—”

Unfortunately, the words drew Gabriel’s attention. “Aziraphale! So this is where you got to. And—” he made a face like someone who’d smelled something terrible. “You’re _in_that human?”

Aziraphale absently quashed Crowley’s attempt to interject a comment—he hadn’t decided quite what it would be, but it was definitely not going to be tasteful—and ignored the question. “Hello, Gabriel,” he said, with a decent attempt at polite blandness. “Yes, I am.”

Gabriel’s face was back to its stiff smile. Crowley wanted to tell him that if he wasn’t careful it would freeze that way. “And what,” he said through gritted teeth, “Are you _doing_here?”

Aziraphale’s smile in return was smaller, but distinctly more sincere. “Interfering. Now, I think the boy’s been quite clear—”

“And now we zzzhall be clear,” the demon interrupted. “Boy. You muzzt begin it. It izzz your dezzztiny.”

“I don’t think I want to,” Adam started, looking vaguely cornered.

“Young man,” Gabriel said, walking over and looming. The condescension in his voice set Crowley’s teeth on edge, and it wasn’t even aimed at him. “The war _must_happen. And _you_have to start it. That’s why you’re here, after all. You can’t just refuse to be who you are.”

Adam frowned at that. “We got in plenty of trouble when we pushed the Johnsonites into the pond and they broke off all the water lilies thrashing around. Don’t see why I should let you do the same thing, ‘cept to the whole world. It was great when they were all dripping and green, but they dried off soon enough, and there weren’t any flowers on the pond all year that year.”

The demon made a disgusted* noise. “Thizzz isn’t about games with your friends. You were put on thizz Earth for one reason. To end it. It’zzzz time.”

*and disgusting

“Wait a minute,” Crowley broke in. Gabriel looked pointedly down his nose at him, and the demon gave him a completely revolted look, but he pressed on. A idea, born of Aziraphale’s words from months ago and Gabriel’s from just now, was barreling rapidly up from his sub-conscious. He didn’t have the full shape of it quite yet, but he knew where to start. “He has to be who he is.”

“Yes,” Gabriel said impatiently. “I just said that.”

“And who he is, is human. He is, right? Partly, at least, or whatever?”

“Yes, and?” Gabriel looked bored at the question.

Aziraphale shifted, apparently thinking about contributing, but Crowley hurried on, the idea now fully unfurled, the words finally clear. “So, he’s human. That means he gets to make a choice.”

There was a pause at that. “A choice?” Gabriel asked finally.

“Humans. We have free will and all that. Part of the package, from what I understand.”

The demon gave him a cursory glance. “You aren’t human.”

“Nah, I am. Aziraphale’s just along for the ride,” Crowley said easily. “But Adam’s definitely human. And you can’t make him a human and then tell him that he just has to do what you say. That’s not how it works, right? Your rules. Not mine.”

“The Antichrist hazzz a job,” the demon buzzed. “It izz not optional.”

Aziraphale, finally, joined in, hands wringing themselves together rightly, but tone more hopeful. “The free will thing was pretty clear,” he murmured. “The whole creation was set up so that humans could make choices, after all. We were supposed to let them do that. Not interfere. Er. Too much, anyway. I don’t remember Her making an exception, even for Her own son. Or Lucifer’s.”

Gabriel dismissed that point with a wave. “It’s not _interference _when it’s Head Office. She gave them free will, She can take it away.”

Aziraphale still had their hands tightly clasped in front of them, but he kept their back straight and their voice clear as he answered. “But, then, the Almighty isn’t here. Is she.”

Gabriel gaped at them, offense in every line. The demon, not seeming impressed by that argument, ignored them, turning back to Antichrist. “Boy. Do it. Now.”

Adam darted a glance back up at Aziraphale and Crowley, searching their face for reassurance. He apparently found it. “No.”

The demon and Gabriel exchanged a glance, sidling towards each other to have a quieter conversation. Crowley caught the words “—supposed to just stand down?” and “Doesn’t bear thinking about.”

“Whatever they say,” Aziraphale said bracingly as the two turned and approached again, “You don’t have to do it. They can’t make you.”

Gabriel rolled his eyes and turned to Adam, completely Aziraphale. “Young man. I don’t know what my, um, former colleague has been telling you, but nothing he says represents the positions of our Head Office. He’s not acting in any official capacity as a representative of Heaven.”

“Prob’ly for the best, that,” Adam said. “I don’t think I want any “official representatives” of Heaven around here. Or Hell. You should leave.” He swept a pointed look around. As his gaze touched first Gabriel and then the demon, they vanished into thin air, leaving only faintly sparkling gaps where they had been, which quickly faded to nothing at all.

“Ooooh,” Aziraphale said faintly, apparently torn between delight and horror.

“That should settle that,” Adam said firmly. “They can figure out who’s gang is better somewhere else.”

The other children, who’d been watching silently, let out a thin assortment of cheers. The two adults seemed to sag into each other in relief. Crowley looked around. “Is that it, then?” he asked. It all seemed a bit too easy, but he wasn’t about to complain.

“I’m not quite sure—” Aziraphale said, then cut himself with a gasp off as a tremor shook the ground. “Oh,” he said, voice completely flat. A sharp wave of adrenaline—how did they have any left?—rolled through their body in response to what Crowley realized was Aziraphale’s absolute terror about whatever was happening.

“Angel!” Crowley snapped. “What’s happening.”

“It’s, um—” The ground trembled again. “I’m terribly afraid that Lord Beelzebub told Adam’s father. Ah, his _other _father.”

“His—” Crowley cut himself off, hearing the disbelief in his own voice. “We just got rid of the other two and now the fucking devil—”

“Language,” Aziraphale scolded, as Adam’s big eyes turned to them.

“What is it?” he demanded. “What’s happening now?”

Crowley could still feel Aziraphale’s fear in their racing heartrate and trembling hands, but he was trying hard to keep their voice even as he spoke. “Your, er, other father. Not the one who raised you, the one who, um, gave you up. Is, well, Satan. I think he’s coming. Here. And he’s angry.”

Adam looked down at that, stamping a foot absently on the ground, and Crowley was abruptly reminded that the self-possessed Antichrist was, in fact, just a kid. “What does he want here, anyway? ‘s not like he’s my real dad. Just wants to show up and tell me off.”

They knelt next to him, putting their head on level with his and catching his eyes with theirs. “Adam. I’m sorry, it’s not fair, but he’s coming for you, and he’s going to put everyone here in terrible danger. You’re going to have to do something about it.”

For the first time, the boy looked scared. “But I don’t know what to do. I thought making _them_go away would be enough. But they weren’t so scary. How’m I supposed to. . .” He trailed off, flicking a glance at the hairline crack that had appeared in the pavement.

“We’ll figure something out.” It was hard to be convinced of the truth of that, but an Antichrist who doubted his own abilities would hardly be helpful.

“He probably should take me back with him or something,” Adam said, adolescent sulkiness almost masking the terror in his voice. “Since I’m evil or a demon or whatever. Then maybe he’d leave everyone else alone.”

The grit underneath their knees, the frantic pounding of their heart, the taste of panic in the back of their throat, belonged equally to both of them. Their voice seemed to flutter between Crowley’s drawl and Aziraphale’s soft tones, and when they spoke Crowley was no longer sure who was uttering the words. “But you’re not a demon. Maybe a part of you came from Hell long ago, but you’re not really from there. You’ve been raised here, grown up here on Earth.” They waited until he’d looked back at them, until they were sure he was truly listening. “From where we stand, you’re just as human as the rest of ‘em.” They gestured at the onlookers. “Don’t you think so?”

Adam, staring hard into their eyes, gave a jerky nod.

“And what Crowley said earlier is true. The thing about humans is, you get to choose,” Aziraphale said, his voice distinct for a moment. “That is your inheritance. Free will and the knowledge to use it. And that’s your infernal father’s fault, too, so he can hardly complain.”

That earned small frown of concentration. “Choose what?”

“To take care of the people who need you. To do the right thing.” The ground gave a harder shake and everyone staggered. They braced themselves and held out a steadying hand to Adam, who grasped it tightly. Crowley added, almost under their breath, “You got this, kid.”

There was another, stronger shake as the crack split open. It released a blast of heat like opening a vast oven door. Out of the rising smoke rose the points of what were revealed to be a massive red crown, which rose further to reveal a furious face. Lucifer straightened to his full height, towering over the humans clustered on the blacktop.

“Where is he?” The voice was impossibly loud, the presence too strong, and Crowley fought back the urge to collapse to their knees. But perhaps he’d built up immunity from years of exposure to Aziraphale, or maybe his stubbornness and spite, burning the last reserves he had, were simply enough by themselves. However it was, they managed to keep their feet in the face of the blast. “Where is my disobedient son?”

Adam, alone of all the humans, didn’t look like he was using all his strength to stand. He took a few steps forward, standing alone in front of all of them. “I’m here.”

“You.” There was venom in the voice now. “What have you done?”

“I chose to stop all the bad things from happening. So we could keep the world the way it is.” Adam’s voice was still strong, no trace of the tremor of fear from earlier. He gestured behind him, and Crowley could feel Aziraphale’s surge of terror at being brought to the attention of the Lord of Hell, but they stood steady too. “They said that me making choices or knowing about them or something was all your fault in the first place. So I don’t figure you can be too mad about it, anyway.”

Lucifer’s face warped into an expression that Crowley couldn’t interpret. “You use my own gift of knowledge to humankind as a weapon against me?”

Adam grinned up at him. “My dad—my real dad—is always telling me I need to accept the consequences for my actions. And he’s usually right, in the end. Anyway, I reckon it’s a bit late for you to do anything about it now anyway.”

An appalling sound battered Crowley’s ears like waves hammering on an eroding cliff. His brain felt like half of it was about to give up and slide into the sea. It was a long moment before he could realize that it was _laughter_. “My rebellious son,” Lucifer said. “Very well. Let the punishment fit the crime. You are cast out of Hell. Sentenced to Earth.” Unbelievably, he gave Adam an unmistakable wink. “And we will hear no more of it.”

Lucifer didn’t do anything so undignified as climb back below the ground. Instead another flare of light and heat rolled over them, and when they could see again he was gone, the asphalt as smooth as if he had never been there. A weight felt as it if had been lifted from Crowley’s chest.

There was a distant sound of an approaching vehicle engine, then, and Adam’s head came up, a faint look of alarm coming back into his eyes.

“Adam,” one of the other kids started warningly. “Isn’t that—”

“It’s my dad,” he agreed. He turned back to Aziraphale and Crowley. “I’m _really _not supposed to be here. But first—” He gestured, and something happened, Crowley could feel it, but he wasn’t sure what it was. The boy nodded. “That’s better.”

“Ah,” a dearly familiar voice said, from a couple of feet to Crowley’s right, and he realized what Adam had done. “Thank you, my dear.”

“No problem. ‘s how you’re supposed to be, really.” With that he scooped up his bike and ran in the opposite direction, the others following him in a flock.

“Oh dear,” Aziraphale said vaguely. Crowley watched him watch the fleeing boy. “I do hope that won’t be any trouble.”

Crowley shrugged, offering an arm. It was jarring, for a moment, not to feel every move as Aziraphale made it, but the odd discomfort was already being worn away by the familiarity of the hand gently curled around him. “Can’t always make the right choices, angel. Lift home?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Armageddon!
> 
> It was surprisingly difficult to write. Especially a scene that can be directly compared to the source material. It's not that I thought it needed improving or anything, I think the original is brilliant, I just wanted a slightly different version for this AU. I hope it ended up working!
> 
> I wanted more dirty jokes about Aziraphale possessing Crowley, but alas, my genius doesn't lie in that direction. A sad lack. Know that, spiritually, they are there.
> 
> Just one more chapter to go!


	9. Chapter 9

It wasn’t that simple, of course. First Aziraphale insisted that they ferry the two remaining humans to their vehicle, and then, after seeing it, that they follow them home to make sure they got there. Crowley sneered and made comments about how anyone who bought a three-wheeled car deserved it if they ended up in a ditch and snuck glances at the angel in the passenger seat, so much more immediately present than a reflection in a mirror.

They sat idling in the BMW until the girl and her boy had safely made it inside the cottage before Crowley pulled away, driving through the village at a pace that felt unbearably slow and was, in fact, only fifteen kilometers above the limit. Dusk was falling fast, the color finally fading in the sky, but it still didn’t take them long to clear the village and make it back out onto more open country roads.

Beside him, Aziraphale made a quiet noise of satisfaction. As they’d been driving through the village he’d apparently been focused on the passing houses and occasional person, but now that they were surrounded only by trees and twilight shadows, he’d turned his attention to Crowley, watching the side of his face and smiling whenever he glanced over and caught his eye.

“That went about as well as we could have expected, I think.” Aziraphale’s eyes caught even the low light from the dashboard dials, and Crowley had to tear his attention away to look back at the road.

“World’s still here,” he agreed.

“There is that.” Aziraphale paused a moment. “There’s a stop I’d like to make along the way. It won’t take long, I promise, I’m sure you’re as eager to get home as I.”

Crowley was horribly, selfishly glad that he was driving, now that he couldn’t put this off any longer. “The bookshop—”

“Yes?” Aziraphale said, gently encouraging when Crowley stumbled to a halt.

His throat felt tight, but now there was nobody else to feel it. He managed to force the words out anyway. “It isn’t there anymore.”

There was a pause that lasted lifetimes. “Oh?”

Crowley kept his eyes doggedly fixed on the road. “It burned down.”

Not watching as Aziraphale absorbed the news didn’t save Crowley from hearing the little hitch of breath, or the tightness of his voice that betrayed an attempt to hold back tears. “The books?”

“They’re gone.”

“All—” His voice faltered entirely for a moment. “All of them?”

“Yeah.” Crowley blinked his eyes a few times, trying to bring the painted lines of the road back into focus without giving himself away. “I’m so sorry.”

“The flat?”

“All of it.”

There was another achingly long pause. “How did it happen?” Aziraphale asked, and Crowley was startled to realize that it was a question he hadn’t entertained yet.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I went out to the shops, just for a minute. When I came back—whole thing, up in flames.”

“Oh.”

“I thought you were there,” Crowley blurted, the words spilling out without permission. “I thought you were there, and—”

He felt a touch on his knee, first feather-light and then firmer as Aziraphale’s hand settled, gripping more firmly as Crowley’s words gave out entirely. “Pull over, my dear,” he said.

“There isn’t any shoulder.”

“Pull over.” Aziraphale’s tone brooked no argument, and Crowley obediently pulled the car off at onto a scrap of verge. He stared out the windshield at the patch of grass that was caught by their headlights, trying not to think about the moment earlier that day when he’d been pulling up to the flashing lights, the smell of smoke in his nose, knowing and yet denying what he would find.

The hand still resting on his knee squeezed gently, bringing him back to the present. “Tell me.”

“You were out of cocoa. The book said—” Crowley wasn’t sure how much sense he was making, but Aziraphale was silent, the single point of contact between them the only sign that he was there. “When I got back, there were trucks, and hoses, and it was already half gone up. And I knew you’d been in there.”

The hand on his knee disappeared, and for a moment he thought Aziraphale had withdrawn, too caught up in his own grief at the image to offer comfort. Which was fine. He’d had a shock, whereas Crowley had had hours to process it. Crowley’s worst nightmare had come and gone again with Aziraphale’s return, after all, and he could hardly claim greater grief than the angel, who’d lost the home he’d had for centuries.

It was only a moment, though, before Crowley registered the sound of a car door opening, and then another. It was only when he felt one hand on his shoulder and another gently cupping his cheek that he realized that Aziraphale had slipped around to his side of the car and was leaning in over him, murmuring comfortingly although too quietly to make out the words.

His thumb brushed over Crowley’s cheek, and he realized that it was wiping away a tear. “Didn’t know when you’d be—back. If you even were—”

“Hush, my dear,” Aziraphale said gently, settling into a crouch that let him look up into Crowley’s eyes, trying to catch his gaze. “I’m fine. Even a burning building couldn’t do me any lasting damage, you know. Couldn’t keep me from coming back to you.”

Crowley shuddered all over and tried to focus on the warm hands that were now gently covering his own, rubbing soft circles against his wrists. “Didn’t know if it was hellfire,” he mumbled, staring down at his lap.

He’d spoken quietly, but the catch in Aziraphale’s breath told him that he’d heard. He abruptly had a lapful of angel, pressing up against him, winding his arms tightly around Crowley’s shoulders and overall not seeming to care that there shouldn’t have been room for another person between the driver’s seat and the wheel.

“I’m here,” Aziraphale was murmuring, again and again. “I wasn’t even in the fire. I’m here. I promise, I won’t—” He cut off whatever he was going to say, the hand that was smoothing circles against the back of Crowley’s neck halting for a moment before it resumed. “I’m here.”

It was long minutes until Crowley’s breath returned to something near a normal rhythm, and minutes after that before Aziraphale loosened his hold enough to lean back and meet his eyes. Crowley blinked, staring hard, clinging to the physical presence of that face, the weight of his husband in his lap, so much more immediate than a reflection in a mirror.

“’m being ridiculous,” he said finally. “We saved the world.”

Aziraphale smiled softly. “You’ve had quite a day. It would hardly be becoming to begrudge you a moment or two."

“The flat—” His voice wavered, despite his efforts.

“You made it for us once,” Aziraphale said. “You can do it again. Something just as wonderful.” In the wrong voice the words would have been flip, a dismissal of everything that their home had meant. But Aziraphale’s tone was impossibly gentle and so evidently sincere that they were turned into a blessing, tugging the barest hint of a smile from Crowley’s lips.

“I had a pretty special canvas to work with,” he admitted. “Wasn’t really all my doing. Re-creating it—”

“You draw up wonders from nothing every day.” Aziraphale’s eyes were fixed on him, faith banked behind them like the embers of a fire. “You’ll make us something new and beautiful.”

It was a look that could go to a man’s head, even under the circumstances. “You don’t like new.”

The angel gave him a hint of a smile. “It’s not always so bad.”

The flat, of course, wasn’t the only thing that had been lost. “The books—”

Aziraphale’s eyes closed for a moment—unremarkable, perhaps, except that one of Aziraphale’s few angelic tells was that he blinked just slightly too rarely, and never as an automatic reaction. When he did, it was because he wanted to hide. “Just books,” he said. His voice had the steadiness that Crowley hadn’t been able to summon; it was the very flatness of them that gave him away. “I gathered them once. I can—I can do it again.”

Crowley frowned at him, trying to figure out if the attempt at stoicism was a necessary coping mechanism, or merely an attempt to keep him from worrying. “You loved them.”

Aziraphale brushed the words away with a wave of his hand. “Of all the things that I could have lost today, the books are really the least of it.”

“Angel—”

“If we hadn’t—” Aziraphale’s mask cracked for a moment. “Well. I’m not sure how much of the credit we can really claim. Regardless. If the boy hadn’t—or, rather, if he had—”

“I know what you mean,” Crowley interjected.

The hand on his knee was gripping hard enough to bruise. “I could have lost so much more.”

Crowley didn’t know what to say. He could have echoed Aziraphale’s earlier comforts about how he wasn’t going anywhere, but they seemed pointless now. Instead he just leaned forward and found Aziraphale’s lips. One kiss turned into two, and then another, and then another that was only interrupted when he accidentally pressed the angel too far back against the wheel and set the horn blaring, making them both jump and settle back into the seat.

“I suppose now is when I admit that you were right,” Aziraphale said in a brave attempt at levity. There seemed to be little to gained by wallowing further, and Crowley went with it.

“’Course I was,” he agreed. “About what, specifically, this time?”

“That we should do something. About Armageddon, I mean. I was all set to give up and let events take their course, you know.” An unpleasant edge was creeping into his voice. “If it had been up to me, Earth would be a pile of so much burning goo by now.”

Crowley looked at his husband for a long moment. “You would have done something regardless. Eventually, anyway.” Aziraphale fidgeted with his hands, looking like he wanted to object. Crowley cut him off with a pat and an unsubtle shifting of his legs. “As charming as this scrap of roadside is, angel, I doubt we want to stay here all night.”

Aziraphale laughed and made a comment about camping under the stars, but went readily back to his own side of the car, making no demur as Crowley, feeling at least marginally steadier, pulled back onto the road and made full speed for London.

The stop Aziraphale wanted to make turned out to be at a small self-storage place on the outskirts of the city. Crowley raised an eyebrow inquisitively as Aziraphale directed him to turn in at the glowing yellow sign. It earned him a sheepish smile, but he didn’t offer an explanation as they wandered the facility, relying on the angel’s apparently imperfect memory of the location of his unit.

When they eventually found it it turned out to be the smallest size offered. Aziraphale opened it—unlocking it not with a click of his fingers, the way he had been the bookshop of late, but with a dulled brass key that had hung, unremarked, next to his others for as long as Crowley had known him—Crowley saw that it was almost empty, aside from a single unassuming cardboard box. Aziraphale went to his knees next to it, folding back the flaps. Crowley, peering down past him, was somehow unsurprised by the contents.

“Books? Really, angel?”

Aziraphale didn’t even glance back up at him, too distracted carefully brushing dust off of the top layer. “Just a few volumes.”

One eyebrow drifted up. “Too good or too bad to be allowed in the shop?”

“They’re not entirely suited for human sight,” Aziraphale said absently, carefully lifting several books out and stacking them on the floor. The next few he pulled out were a matching set in brown and gold. Those he set by his knee, returning the others to the box before retrieving the set and rising. “I didn’t want to risk an inquisitive customer coming across them.”

“Right.” Crowley held the door as Aziraphale turned, apparently ready to leave. He peered past his shoulder at the books in his arms, curious what was so secret that it merited even more security than the angel’s most beloved tomes. The script of the titles, though, twisted before his eyes, catching his gaze but somehow pulling it strangely out of focus. He was snapped out of it by the heavy impact of his shoulder as he ran into the doorframe.

He glanced over to see Aziraphale watching him with exasperation. “I really did just say that they weren’t for human eyes,” he said, moving a hand so that the title was covered and safely out of sight.

Crowley didn’t deign to reply, merely leading them back to the car—and what they were supposed to do with a stolen BMW now that the world hadn’t actually ended, he didn’t know—and wasting no time getting back on the road. “So, what’s so important that you needed it tonight?”

Aziraphale hummed in the way he did when he was pretending he wasn’t avoiding a question. “I wanted to be prepared. Just in case.”

That sent a spike of alarm that had Crowley’s hands tightening on the wheel. “You think that—”

“Nothing like that,” Aziraphale said hastily. “Armageddon has been put to bed for good, I believe. But Heaven will not be particularly pleased. Nor Hell, I suppose, but at least that one won’t be my problem. There may be some lingering, erm, legal entanglements.”

“_Legal entanglements,_” Crowley repeated, eyebrows rising. “We going to need to find a lawyer?”

“Oh, no, not that, I’m quite sure lawyers came from the other side,” Aziraphale said absently. Crowley did not find the statement reassuring. “But the Heavenly version of a legal dispute, yes. And I thought it best to be prepared. Hence, the books. They’re the equivalent of a code of law, I suppose. I’ll just take a quick look tonight, it should clarify the situation.”

Crowley snorted, but didn’t try to argue. If spending all night pouring over his books helped Aziraphale feel in control, there didn’t seem to be any harm in it. If anything did crop up, they’d deal with it then. It wasn’t like the Archangels could sue, anyway.

The rest of the drive was mostly quiet, even the moment when Crowley realized that he’d let habit take over and was absently taking them straight to the heart of Soho. He corrected course silently, steering them to a rather nice hotel near his old flat in Mayfair. Aziraphale’s eyes were dark with emotion as he glanced over as they pulled in, but he didn’t speak as Crowley tossed the keys to the valet, ignoring his hesitant stutter as he waited for them to remove their non-existent luggage. Crowley, for his part, was rather regretting the choice not to stop somewhere and buy himself some new clothes—Aziraphale’s, having been recently reconstituted from nothing and being, moreover, his, were as spotless as usual, but the same could not be said for the pair of jeans and clinging black t-shirt that had been a flattering if casual outfit before it had been exposed to a fire, several hours of frantic driving, the literal end of the world, and a close encounter with the Devil. The clerk booked them into a room without any hesitation, though, sliding over key cards and pointing them to the elevator.

Aziraphale heaved a sigh as he closed the door behind them, leaning back against it and looking as relieved as Crowley felt to have been able to shut out the rest of the world that they’d managed to save. Well, help save. Well, they’d provided moral support, at any rate.

Crowley couldn’t resist the opportunity to crowd closer, bracketing Aziraphale with his arms as he leaned in for a kiss. It was returned with a great deal of affection but no additional intent. Crowley briefly considered taking this as a challenge—he was quite sure he could win the angel over, and something about saving the world seemed to call for a celebration and reminder that they were both, improbably enough, still here—but he was tired to his bones, and now that the thought had occurred to him he couldn’t stop noticing the smell of smoke clinging to him. Rather than deepening the kiss he moved to tuck his chin over Aziraphale’s shoulder, relishing the sheer warmth and solidity as he leaned against him.

Aziraphale returned the embrace, but it wasn’t too long before Crowley could feel the little movements that betrayed a restlessness he was trying to suppress. Of course, he’d be wanting to get to whatever those books were he’d thought were important enough to get tonight.

Crowley forced himself upright, gently pulling away. “I need a shower.”

Aziraphale smiled and held out a hand that was now holding a set of clean black pajamas and robe. Before Crowley had even made his way into the bathroom the angel had retrieved his books and was settling in at the desk, looking for all the world as if he intended to make a night of it.

The bathroom was just as pointlessly luxuriant as the rest of the hotel, and as he showered Crowley amused himself by tallying the extraneous touches that actually improved the experience against those that did not. He came out with a tally of eleven to fourteen, which was honestly better than he’d expected, and was both quite a bit cleaner and more cheerful when he emerged in a cloud of steam to find that Aziraphale had rapidly managed to colonize the entire work-oriented side of the room, with three of the leather-bound books open at once, pages of notes surrounding them in ever-expanding rings.

The angel was deeply absorbed in his work, not even looking up as Crowley wandered over and stretched himself out over the really quite nice bed. One indulgence where money had been well-spent. Perhaps they’d be able to find something similar, when they were buying— He cut the thought off there and simply stared at the ceiling, not thinking of anything much at all.

It was some time later that Aziraphale closed one of the three books with a decisive snap and turned, catching sight of Crowley on the bed. He smiled, and for a moment Crowley thought the moment might turn into something more. But apparently he’d merely been going through his mental list of human needs, the smile turning into a worried look and a short interrogation about the last time Crowley had had a glass of water, moving into dire mutterings about dehydration. A minute later he’d found and snatched up the ice bucket, assuring Crowley that he’d be back in just a tick.

The moment the door had swung closed behind him Crowley was up and striding over to where the angel had been sitting, fully ready to take advantage of his brief opportunity to snoop. He squinted down at the pages spread wide across the desk. The book, when he took a cautious glance at the pages, was completely incomprehensible—he couldn’t even identify what script it was written in, much less read any of it—but Aziraphale’s notes were thankfully in English, and he scanned rapidly down the page. Near the top was a note that read “One flesh = shared culpability?” There were a few dense lines of text under that that he didn’t bother trying to decipher in the brief moments he had, and then another short line that read “May stand with/for the other.”

Well down the page was another note—“‘Forgiveness, once bestowed, shall be everlasting’ = No double jeopardy.” Off to the side of that, in a slightly looser hand, two short words: “C safe.”

That was. . . illuminating. Of the angel’s mental state, if nothing else. It wasn’t that Crowley was surprised that Aziraphale was thinking of keeping him safe first—he could hardly have missed the angel’s escalating protectiveness ever since Gabriel had first shown up in the shop—but it was the implications of the statement that caught his attention.

If Aziraphale was worried about establishing Crowley’s safety, that meant. Well. There was something to worry about. 

The faint sound of footsteps and then repeated beeps as Aziraphale attempted to use the keycard to unlock the door gave plenty of warning, and Crowley was slouching nonchalantly in the other chair by the time the angel had managed to let himself into the room, clutching the newly-filled ice bucket triumphantly. He busied himself fussily dropping a few into a glass and filling it at the sink before pointedly setting on a cardboard coaster on the table at Crowley’s elbow. Crowley murmured his thanks and Aziraphale smiled in response, all the world like someone who was not worried about some _legal complications _that were increasingly starting to look a good deal more complicated than he’d previously deigned to let on.

Crowley wasn’t finding himself moved to confess to his snooping, which left him at rather loose ends. Sitting there and pretending that everything was fine was just out, but distracting Aziraphale was seeming less and less advisable. Out of sheer habit he fished out his phone, but neither work emails about the proper work site safety protocols in the event of a shower of fish nor a twitter feed inexplicably devoid of speculation about mysterious sea monsters or a continent abruptly materializing in the Atlantic could hold his attention, not with the words of Aziraphale’s notes rattling around his mind.

He found himself once again absently in his photos folder. This time he stared down at the thumbnails, all much too small to read, before letting his finger fall deliberately onto one. If the mad old woman knew the future, after all, then it would have be the one he needed, right? Half resentful and half hopeful, he read the prophecy at the top of the page:

_When the push comes to shovve, ye shalle know wot to do._

Well, that was helpful. He flipped to another picture. Between two dense paragraphs that he didn’t even bother trying to skim, a short prophecy caught his eye.

_See previous._

Crowley scowled, resisting the childish urge to stick his tongue out at his phone, and flicked through at a couple more at random. By the time he’d read a warning about staying out of San Francisco for the spring of 1906, advice for someone named Diffidence to wait to reshingle her roof until after the hailstorm coming in March, and something entirely obscure about trumpets, lambs and avocados, he was forced to accept that he had what he was going to get.

Apparently he would know what to do. Helpful.

It was only after some concerted glaring at his phone a few rounds of sorting some kind of baked goods in an idiotic phone game that he’d somehow picked up recently that it struck him that maybe ‘previous’ was a bit further back than he’d been thinking.

He felt like he’d tried half the pages of the book before he found the prophecy again, sitting at the bottom of a page, the words half-remembered. Someone returning from the ashes, that was clearly Aziraphale from the fire, the two them together while Aziraphale was possessing him. Made more sense in retrospect, which as far as he could tell was par for the course with prophecies. What was the point if it was only comprehensible after it had all already happened?

And now he was back to supposedly knowing what to do when the time came, which was even less helpful than most of the prophecies were purported to be. 

Fingers closed around his phone, whisking it out of his grip before he could react, and he looked up just in time to see an angel sinking to his knees in front of the chair. It was perhaps one of the only sights that could have distracted him from his pointlessly circling thoughts. Distract him it did, all of his fruitless speculation sliding away as his focus narrowed to soft pink lips in front of him. Aziraphale caught the line of his gaze and set his hands against Crowley’s thighs to press himself up and forward, hovering there a moment until Crowley leaned down to meet him. The kiss was enough to make the rest of the world drop away entirely, and Crowley lost himself in it. This, this was why they’d had to save the world.

“You were very brave.” Aziraphale looked at him through his lashes, a move that would have succeeded in exuding unstudied innocence if Crowley hadn’t seen him do it dozens of times before, generally under rather similar circumstances. It was still effective, in its way, in that it reminded him of those circumstances, and what had commonly followed them.

Crowley swallowed against a throat that had gone dry for much more enjoyable reasons than earlier. “I didn’t do very much, angel.”

Aziraphale’s hands were gliding up his thighs, tortuously slow. “You averted the apocalypse. Just by being human.”

Crowley breathed out a sigh, eyes fixed on where Aziraphale’s hands were still just barely moving towards where he really wanted them. “Anyone could have done it, then.”

Aziraphale cocked his head, the look he gave him now brimming with far too much heat to pull off even the illusion of innocence. “Maybe. But they didn’t.”

Crowley knew the rules of how this game was supposed to go. But then again, he’d never been much of one for following someone else’s rules. Trying to hurry Aziraphale up was inevitably doomed to failure, perhaps, but there were other options. And Crowley had never been above cheating when he could get away with it.

He set his own hands over Aziraphale’s and leaned down. The angel, as ever, leaned up into the kiss, letting Crowley deepen it as he pleased. And yet, when Crowley moved a hand to grasp his shirt and tug him closer, he resisted, sinking back down onto his knees.

“I think I ought to show my appreciation.” Aziraphale’s tongue darted out, just enough to moisten lips that Crowley knew from recent and intimate knowledge were definitely not dry. No matter how much his brain knew it was a ploy, though, certain other uncooperative parts of his body were entirely taken in, ready to surrender unconditionally. And after the way his thighs jumped under Aziraphale’s hands, the angel had to know it too.

“Feel like getting on with it?” Crowley managed. “Any time soon?”

Aziraphale hummed in a way that Crowley desperately hoped he’d repeat in a minute or two, or whenever he finally reached his objective. “Perhaps you have waited enough for me for one day,” he allowed, and took mercy on him.

They’d made it from the chair to the bed, eventually. It wasn’t the same closeness as sharing a body had been, of course, but there was still something about it that struck him with a new sense of familiarity. Opening and welcoming a part of Aziraphale into himself again, even if it was just a physical exchange this time, had a new resonance, a memory of when they shared the same breath. Except that this time it was Aziraphale’s hands on him, Aziraphale’s lips against his skin or breathing out the sound of his name, Aziraphale’s hips under his fingers as he made Crowley fall apart. And when Aziraphale followed him, panting against his mouth and then pressing close in a frantic kiss, it turned out that they could still share the same air after all.

Better than being possessed, altogether.

Aziraphale remained, a warm and softly breathing presence at his back, until Crowley had gone limp, the events of the day finally reaching out to pull him under into sleep. He had nearly succumbed when the bed shifted, the weight behind him sliding away. Aziraphale was back to work, then.

Crowley had almost drifted off again when realization hit him with all the subtlety of a bus. His eyes snapped open, even as he kept the rest of his body still, feigning sleep poorly but well enough to fool the angel on the other side of the room. The archaic text he’d been staring at was still as clear as day in his mind’s eye.

Flamme.

No. It couldn’t be. Not again.

**

Aziraphale was the most stubborn bastard Crowley had ever known.

In the morning the angel had waited until they’d ordered breakfast from room service and he’d materialized fresh clothes for Crowley before calmly announcing that he wanted to go see the bookstore. Crowley hadn’t really needed the surge of adrenaline to chase his coffee, but the moment it had abated he was mounting a spirited defense. There was nothing to see; it wouldn’t be safe to go in yet anyway; it was only going to be depressing; the morning could be much more pleasantly spent elsewhere. Unvoiced was the dread pooling in his stomach at the mere thought of standing helpless on the street corner again.

All of it was in vain. Aziraphale said, quite reasonably, that all he wanted to do was look, and that none of it would dare collapse with him there, anyway. And that surely Crowley wanted to fetch the Bentley, anyway.

When none of that swayed Crowley’s hardened heart, Aziraphale said, in rather less reasonable tones, that he would be going, and Crowley was welcome to accompany him or not as he chose.

The only thing worse than going with Aziraphale to look at the charred husk of their home was imagining Aziraphale going off alone. So they’d walked arm in arm through the rather pleasant morning, along the streets from Mayfair to Soho that had become familiar when they’d once been the way to Crowley’s old flat. Maybe they’d move back over this way again. Crowley wasn’t sure he was up for another place in Soho. Not yet, anyway. Mayfair’d be a more convenient commute, anyway.

The distraction of considering the various apartment buildings in Mayfair that he considered acceptable was a welcome one, and he barely even registered as they drew closer to the Greek Street. It was only when Aziraphale came to an abrupt stop that Crowley’s attention shifted, looking involuntarily in the same direction that his husband was staring so fixedly.

The street corner was occupied. Not by a ruin of charred and collapsing timbers, but by a handsome Georgian building, dark red walls topped by light bricks, and a gleaming gold sign over the door. A.Z. Fell and Co.

It was a few moments before Crowley could even take in what he was seeing, much less begin to process it. Looking up, he could see a few green leaves emerging from over the roofline. Looking in through the windows to the street it was easy to make out shelf after shelf, all overflowing with books. The upper windows to the flat were obscured by the curtains that looked as pristine as the day they’d put them in.

“But—it—here—” Crowley realized he wasn’t really making sense. “It burned down,” he said urgently, turning to Aziraphale. “I swear, angel, I saw it, it was in flames, they couldn’t save it, they _told me so_.”

Aziraphale reached out absently to pat his hand, apparently unable to tear his own eyes away from the building. “I believe you, my dear.”

There had been plenty of things in the last few days that hadn’t made much sense, but this was somehow the final straw. “Then how is it here?” he hissed, turning to glare at it again. Maybe Aziraphale had the right idea, keeping an eye on it in case it tried anything else.

“I imagine it was the Antichrist.” Aziraphale’s tone was matter-of-fact, but the intensity of his gaze betrayed him. “Many of the events that preceded Armageddon appear to have been undone, from what I saw—or, rather, didn’t see—in this morning’s paper. This must have been one of them.”

That—that made as much sense as anything could, Crowley supposed. He stared at the building for another long minute as the hundreds of memories of seeing it just like this* overwrite the last view he’d had of it, glowing orange and half hidden in smoke, steeling himself to walk over and step through the familiar door.

*Well, slightly dingier—apparently Adam was used to living in a house where the windows were washed rather more frequently than once a decade.

When it happened, it happened so quickly that Crowley didn’t even have time to react. Aziraphale’s hand was simply no longer in his own, a muffled sound the only other sign that something had happened. Crowley reached out but found only empty air, and by the time he’d turned to look they’d already dragged Aziraphale ten feet down the sidewalk. His hands were bound, and a wide stripe of tape covered his mouth—his eyes, wild and frantic, sought and found Crowley’s just before he was forcibly turned and shoved onward.

They had a head start, and the advantage of surprise. But Crowley had an advantage none of them could ever dream of: a lifetime’s experience of hurrying through London crowds. Even with the people around them ignoring—no doubt miraculously—the kidnapping that had happened right in front of them, the sidewalks were still busy enough to slow them down as they were forced to drag their captive around groups of tourists or shoppers looking into windows.

Crowley cut through the crowd ruthlessly, sliding through the slimmest of gaps, stepping into the street as if heedless of oncoming cars, cutting off cross traffic and ignoring the eddies of irritation he left in his wake. The angels hadn’t managed to clear the end of the next block before Crowley was closing on them fast.

“Hey! You there!” No response, aside from a frantic twitch of Aziraphale’s head, an aborted attempt to look back around, stopped by a hand fisted in his collar.

The two holding Aziraphale’s arms were new, but the others were familiar faces. Apparently Aziraphale had been right about how quickly they’d be able to replace their bodies. The more unpleasant-looking one had a long name that Crowley couldn’t remember, but the other was easier.

“Oi! Uriel!”

That got a reaction. Both of the Archangels looked back, Uriel’s face stony, the other one’s—Sand-something?—still alight with evident enjoyment at their caper. Crowley’s dislike crystalized a little more. They didn’t stop, but the distraction had checked their speed, and Crowley was almost up to them now.

“Uriel!” He flashed an insincere grin when that got him another look. “Didn’t expect to see your lot around here again. At least not so soon.”

“Go away.” Her voice was almost impassive, only a hint of belligerence revealing her true feelings. “This doesn’t concern you.”

Crowley raised an eyebrow theatrically. “Given that it’s my husband you’re dragging away, it really does.”

The other one leered. “Go away, or we’ll have to make you.” They sounded rather like they hoped he’d take them up on the offer.

Crowley held his hands up disarmingly. “’m not trying to stop you, am I.”

Uriel sniffed. “What do you want, then, human?”

“Like I said, he’s my husband. You’re not taking him anywhere without me.”

That earned him a moment of genuine surprise, followed by an exasperated huff. “You don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

They’d started moving again, making even slower progress down the block as the ones with Aziraphale led the way, the Archangels looking back and Crowley sidling along behind them. “Husband,” he said again. “Look, I don’t want to cause trouble*, but I have rights. I’m going with you.”

*A lie large enough that by rights a lightning bolt should have taken out not just Crowley, but half of Soho.

Crowley had been rather more than half expecting that this would earn him a sneer and whatever physical retribution the other Archangel could think up. Instead he got a poisonous glare, after which Uriel turned away, pointedly ignoring him. Neither moved to block his way, though, or to do anything else to prevent them as he trailed the small group through the streets of London.

The pair of muscle had stayed resolutely ahead, holding Aziraphale rigidly between them so that all Crowley could see was the back of his coat and a head of fluffy white curls. He wasn’t even sure if Aziraphale had heard the exchange and knew he was tailing after him. But for now, it was all he could do to, baffled, follow the angels into an office building and step onto the escalator. It went on and on, up and up, well beyond what the lobby should have held, ending on a landing with a single unremarkable steel door that opened into a rectangle of brilliant light. Still nobody prevented Crowley from following, so he walked unhindered into Heaven.

Heaven was empty. Shakespeare had said it about Hell, but it was the only thing Crowley could think of as they cleared the top of the escalator and he saw what was waiting for them. He did not, as a matter of principle, oppose an intimidatingly large and open space—he’d designed a good few of them in his day, after all—and he was at heart a minimalist. But when Crowley did it, he did it with purpose. It had a reason. It had a function. It had _style_.

This? This was just a barren expanse of white tile and boring florescent lighting that Crowley would have been embarrassed to be associated with in any capacity. This was what one of his professors could have held up in class as a perfect example of waste of space. One with a suspiciously high number of ugly air vents, particularly for a building that was, presumably, miraculously ventilated.

Heaven apparently lacked not only such amenities as a basic sense of style, but also furniture, decent climate control, and, most surprisingly, angels. The entire glowing wasteland was deserted, aside from the four angels hustling Aziraphale along and Crowley, strolling after them with his hands jammed in his pockets. They traversed the entire length of the room—it seemed endless, but perhaps that was just the sheer repetitiveness of the featureless white columns and everlasting acoustic tiles—and shoved Aziraphale ahead of them through a double door into another immoderately large space. This one was more of an atrium, curved glass walls and ceiling that suggested to Crowley that Heaven had been constructed in the 1990’s.

Three things waited for them there: an office chair that should have been incongruously mundane in Heaven but instead seemed right at home, a ring of stones on the floor, and the Archangel Gabriel. He was facing away, looking out the windows, although he evidently heard them come in. “Ah, Aziraphale, there you are. Just in time. I trust by now you’ve—" He stopped as he finally caught sight of their little cavalcade, eyes skipping right over Aziraphale and his captors to catch on Crowley. His smug smile melted away into a glare. Crowley met it with a smirk.

“What is the _human _doing here?” Gabriel demanded, turning the glare on the other Archangels.

At a gesture from Uriel, the other two angels marched Aziraphale over to the chair and forced him down into it. Another gesture and his hands were no longer bound together but were each tied to an arm. Crowley trailed after them, determined to stay close even if it brought him closer to the Archangel.

“He insisted,” Sandalphon said in oily tones. “On accompanying us. Claimed he had a right.”

That earned a frown. “Well?” Gabriel turned to Uriel. “Does he?”

The other Archangel looked unimpressed, although Crowley thought that might just be her default. “If they have a bond that is recognized by the Almighty—” she sighed, resigned. “Yes.”

Gabriel looked back and forth between them for a minute, eyes narrowing as he focused on their left hands. “Looks like he’s staying, then. First human we’ve had up here in a while, eh?” He turned directly to Crowley. Behind the veneer of jocularity, his eyes were poisonous. “Maybe the trip will be edifying.”

Silence would no doubt have been more dignified, but Crowley had really never been one to put dignity above a chance to get a few words in edgewise. Besides, Aziraphale had been gagged, which meant it was up to Crowley to make a scene for both of them. “Thanks so for having me,” he drawled. “Quite the place you’ve got here. You know, if you need more space, there’s a decommissioned mall in Manchester that you could probably get for cheap. I think it would work with your whole—” He waved a hand at their surroundings, enjoying the expressions around him, which ranged from shocked to offended. “Thing you’ve got going up here. Oh, hey, and look at that!” He sauntered off towards the wall of windows that overlooked the cityscape below, feeling a swell of triumph as they all unconsciously followed him, away from Aziraphale in his chair. “I was just saying, wasn’t I, angel, that if they had the Shard up here it might change my opinion on the whole ‘heaven’ thing. And look! There it is!” He rocked back on his heels, surveying the view. “Seems a bit too big, though, doesn’t it? Almost like it’s compensating for something.”

He ignored whatever reactions that had provoked—probably outrage, although it was possible none of the angles were even cognizant of being insulted—to turn and look at Aziraphale. It was the first time he’d seen his face since they’d grabbed him, and he had to steel himself for whatever he might find. The sight of the tape covering his mouth and the rope around his wrists, although not unexpected, sent a surge of suppressed rage down his spine. He caught Crowley’s gaze and attempted what was clearly supposed to be a reassuring smile, although the worried pinch between his eyebrows rather undermined the effect. He was anxious, then, but not panicking. Well, that made one of them.

Crowley raised an eyebrow inquiringly and turned back to the windows. It didn’t take much effort to pretend that he was distracted by the view; he’d never even tried to pretend that he’d been dying to see what all they had ever since Aziraphale had mentioned their sticky-fingered habits. Most of the closest buildings were, disappointingly, ones he could see any day he liked—St Paul’s was unmistakable, as was Big Ben, and of course the Eiffel Tower. He frowned down at some of the slightly shorter structures, thinking that he saw a blaze of glass that had to be the Crystal Palace. Now _that _would be worth a closer look.

The sound of footsteps announced the arrival of newcomers. The first one, dressed all in black and with what strongly resembled horns on the top of his head, made an incongruous figure against the unrelentingly white backdrop. The second figure, who was carefully keeping a fastidious distance from the first, was more familiar.

“Hey! Michael!” Crowley hailed her, enjoying the momentary look of startlement as she caught sight of him. “Wondered when you were going to get here.” He eyed her more carefully. “You’re looking surprisingly corporeal.”

She ignored the remark, first gesturing to the two angels who had toted Aziraphale up, who obediently left. With them safely out of the way she turned to Gabriel and indicated her companion. “They’ve brought it. Why is _he _here?”

“Demanded to come along. We have to let him, Uriel says. Don’t mind him much. It doesn’t change the plan.”

Michael glared venomously at Crowley, then looked to the two who had apparently been charged with the dirty work. “He wasn’t supposed to be a problem anymore.”

Uriel shrugged. “Regular fire’s supposed to work on humans. Doesn’t it?”

“Does the job,” Sandalphon said, smiling unpleasantly.

Uriel turned back to Michael and shrugged. “Maybe he was out.”

Michael looked unimpressed. “Did nobody think to check if he was even home?”

Aziraphale, listening to the conversation, had gone very still, his eyes very hard and very cold. Crowley—well. Crowley wished that he was more surprised.

Gabriel clapped his hands once, calling everyone’s attention back to himself. He smiled a conciliatory smile at Michael. “It hardly matters now. He’s just one human.”

“He discorporated three Archangels.”

“That was him? Well, then.” Gabriel flashed a grin. “Been a busy thing, hasn’t he. Attacking Archangels, interfering with the boy, stopping the war. Maybe it’s for the best he’s here, after all. This should be fun for everyone. Well, not everyone,” he added, turning to glare at Aziraphale. “Fun for the rest of us.”

“You just going to stand around chatting?” the other newcomer asked. Crowley didn’t know them specifically, but he was starting to suspect an appropriate label, and it wasn’t one that was comforting. “This stuff kind of toasts the hands after a bit, if you know what I mean.”

“Right! Right,” Gabriel stepped aside and gestured towards the ring of stones. The other archangels all took a few steps further back. “You’ll like this,” Gabriel said, smile slipping into something ugly as he looked at Aziraphale. “And I’ll bet you didn’t see it coming.”

The demon leaned towards the circle, extending their hands. Fire shot out of them and whirled up into a column that stretched hungrily towards the glass ceiling. Aziraphale’s eyes followed it. The pinch across his forehead deepened, but he didn’t look surprised. The bastard.

Said bastard caught Crowley’s eyes again, his own expression shifting into something more fragile, something that Crowley desperately hoped the other angels in the room couldn’t read. Fear, and grief, and, most unbearable of all, apology.

Crowley couldn’t hold that gaze for more than a minute before he had to break it. Aziraphale owed him an apology, all right, but he would be _damned _if it would be the one the angel currently intended to offer. Aziraphale was stupid, and his ‘plans’ were stupid and unacceptable, and if Crowley had to fix this one himself, which he clearly did, he would.

Gabriel was talking, he realized, oblivious to the fact that he lacked the attention of his intended audience. “—behavior, can’t come as a surprise. After all,” he gave a patently fake laugh, “You did betray everything Heaven stands for.”

“What?” Uriel asked, into the silence that followed. “Nothing to say for yourself?”

Sandalphon sniggered at that but Michael, looking impatient, strode over to Aziraphale and, in one smooth motion, ripped the tape off of his mouth. Crowley winced. Aziraphale didn’t, just worked his jaw for a moment before lapsing into a nervous smile. “I’m sure we can sort all this out peacefully,” he said, darting a glance at the roaring column of fire before looking back up at the other angels. “There’s no harm, surely, in wishing to protect Her creation. And She was, after all, the one who gave them free will. I only reminded—"

Gabriel was suddenly right in front of the chair, looming with intent. Aziraphale faltered to a stop, and Crowley could see his hands clutching tightly at the metal arms, knuckles white with tension. He wanted nothing more than to stride over and shoulder his way between them, but he’d finally managed to edge unnoticed to exactly where he wanted to be, assuming he was right about what they were intending, and he forced himself to stay put. “There was a plan,” the Archangel snapped. “Everything was going smoothly until _you_had to interfere. You may have cheated us out of our victory, but don’t think you’re going to get off scot-free.”

Aziraphale swallowed with an effort. “Nevertheless, doesn’t this—” he nodded at the fire, “Seem like a bit of an overreaction?"

“Not from where we’re standing,” Michael said calmly.

Uriel strode over to the chair, Gabriel moving out of her way. At her touch the ropes fell away, freeing Aziraphale’s hands. She fisted a hand in his collar and hauled him to his feet, even as he tried to sputter a protest.

“Aziraphale.” Gabriel’s voice cut through his attempt, severe and final. “This constitutes a quorum for a tribunal. Your sentence is hellfire. Now, let’s stop wasting time and get on with this, hmm?”

Aziraphale took one step towards the flames. He looked over at Crowley, eyes overflowing with the love that he wouldn’t voice here and regret that hit him almost like a blow. “Gabriel. Michael. Not with—not with him here. Please. He shouldn’t have to see.”

There was no mercy on any of the faces in the room as they turned to look at Crowley. Gabriel shrugged. “He’s the one who wanted to come.”

“Just because he knows a little too much about how things work up here, doesn’t make your boyfriend anyone special,” Uriel said dismissively.

“Husband. And about that,” Crowley said.

Every head in the room swung around to look at him. “Yes?” Michael asked impatiently, when he didn’t go on.

“One flesh. Everyone seems to be telling me about that, recently. May stand for the other.” Crowley grinned, although there was nothing of humor in it. “I’ll be taking this one, thanks.”

The Archangels just gaped at him. Uriel, apparently quicker to grasp the implications than the rest, had just stepped forward, scowling and starting to speak. But it was Aziraphale, faster than any of them, whose agonized cry he could hear. “Crowley!”

Crowley turned his head, letting his glasses slip down enough that Aziraphale would see his wink. “I got this, angel.”

And with that, he stepped into the flames.

It felt just like how he would have expected stepping into a wall of fire would feel, if he’d ever bothered to imagine it. There was a bare moment before the pain hit, and then it felt like, well. Like flames were licking at his skin. Before he could even think of trying to repress it he could hear an agonized sound, not quite a shriek, that had to be coming from him. He tried to bite his lip to muffle the sounds that could only be causing Aziraphale more distress, but somehow even that simple task was beyond his current capabilities. The pain was everywhere, and it didn’t abate. There was no damage, no charred skin, no nerve endings destroyed to give him some relief. It just went on, and on.

He’d known, before he stepped in, that he couldn’t just hop right back out again. No, if Aziraphale had been the one forced into the flames, it probably would have taken some amount of time to finish him, although he didn’t know how long precisely. Crowley couldn’t allow them any loopholes. He had to serve the entirety of Aziraphale’s sentence now. In the midst of it, though, time had stopped having much meaning. He didn’t know how long he’d been in there. He didn’t know how long he needed to stay. He just waited until he knew he couldn’t endure it any longer, and then he stepped forward.

There was air in his lungs again, real air, and the smooth, cool flooring beneath his feet. It was the cessation of pain, as much as anything, that knocked the strength from his legs and he staggered, nearly falling.

Strong hands caught his elbows, guiding him forward until he was leaning against a blessedly broad and solid chest, holding him up with ease. “Crowley, Crowley, darling, are you—” Aziraphale’s voice, frantic with worry, hands stroking so gently across his shoulders and back, tipping his head up to get a look at his face before letting him fall back into the blissful shelter of the crook of his neck. Crowley realized, distantly, that his sunglasses were gone, and then that there wasn’t much of anything else on his body, either. No sooner had he had the realization before there was the sound of fingers snapping and a soft blanket was being gently wrapped around him.

“You’re all right,” Aziraphale was saying now. Crowley couldn’t tell which of them he was trying to convince. “You’re all right, you’re all right, not hurt, you didn’t— Oh, Crowley, you can’t, you can’t just do that, darling, I thought—but you’re all right. You’re fine, that’s all that matters, love, you’re going to be ok, you shouldn’t have, but you’re fine—”

“No double jeopardy,” Crowley muttered into his shoulder.

Aziraphale paused his frantic flow of words. “What was that, dearest?"

He managed to summon up the strength to raise his head enough to prop his forehead against Aziraphale’s jaw instead, giving himself room to speak. “No double jeopardy,” he said more clearly.

For a moment Aziraphale stilled entirely, the warmth of him against Crowley the only sign of life before he finally took a breath again. “Oh, love,” he breathed against his temple. “Did you—is that why—”

Crowley huffed a laugh and started to straighten, finding that his legs were cooperating better. Aziraphale made a worried noise but didn’t try to keep him there, taking hold of his arm and managing to take a good portion of his weight even as he turned to meet the astonished eyes of four fuming Archangels.

“The sentence was hellfire.” His voice came out as more of a croak, and he swallowed. He was pretending, very hard, that he wasn’t making this statement while clutching a blanket around his shoulders. “It was carried out. Now it’s done.” He shifted sideways, putting himself between them and Aziraphale. “You can’t touch him again.”

Michael looked coldly furious. Gabriel was blustering, starting to move towards them with obvious intent, but Uriel caught his arm. “He’s right,” she said, obviously unhappy about it. “Earned forgiveness is eternal. We can’t.”

“We can’t just let a traitor walk out of Heaven—”

“Gabriel.” Michael’s voice was sharp. “Stand down.”

Aziraphale let out a very quiet breath. He stepped up next to Crowley, wrapping an arm around his waist, steadying him as much as he would allow. He paused for just a moment, regarding the other angels, none of whom would meet his eyes. “May we meet on a better occasion,” he said quietly. And then he led Crowley out of Heaven.

By the time they’d reached the bottom of the escalator the strength had returned to his knees, and the arm around his waist was probably unnecessary, although he didn’t pull away. Between the two fires of the last twenty four hours, he thought they could both use the comfort of it.

To Aziraphale’s credit, he waited until they’d made it out to the street before he’d started. At some point during the escalator ride he’d apparently realized that a blanket as a garment would be rather noticeable on the streets of London, and with a gesture he’d blessedly if slightly belatedly replaced it with a passable facsimile of the clothes Crowley had been wearing earlier.

“I do wish you hadn’t,” he said quietly. Even now they weren’t moving quickly, getting dirty looks as they took up more than their fair share of the sidewalk. Aziraphale didn’t even seem to notice, looking sideways at Crowley and nearly running down a small child who wandered into his path. “But thank you."

Crowley slowed his steps long enough to let the toddler pass unharmed, then looked over at Aziraphale in turn. “Better me than you.”

“It was very clever of you to figure it all out. You must have spent quite some time with Agnes. How did you put all that together, darling?”

Crowley shrugged with half his body. “Hell’s all about torturing human souls, right? Wouldn’t be very effective tool if it just destroyed them outright.”

Aziraphale stared at him. “That—that—that—” His voice was growing higher and fainter on every word. “You just thought that—you didn’t _know_?”

Crowley shrugged again, turning to look studiously at the pedestrians coming the other way down the sidewalk instead of Aziraphale’s evident dismay. “It made sense.”

“You decided it would be a good idea to take my place for my—” Aziraphale faltered momentarily, clearly trying to avoid the obvious word. “_Consequences _solely on the basis of conjecture founded upon Hell’s proclivities towards _torture_?”

“Analysis, not conjecture. I liked my odds better.” The truth, of course, was that even if Crowley had known he was going to his certain death, he still would have preferred matters that way around, but he didn’t think hearing that would comfort Aziraphale, right now.

Perhaps the words didn’t need to be said, though, Aziraphale’s arm tightening around him as if to hold him close forever. “I would still prefer you don’t abruptly embark on such perilous plans without any warning, dearest.”

Crowley snorted. “You were planning on disappearing up there and then just never coming back. I don’t think you want to get into a discussion about ill-advised plans.”

“Ah.” A pause. “Quite."

His point had been made, then. No need to dwell on it. “I do think you got the better end of the bargain.”

This time, when Aziraphale smiled at him, it came with the familiar feeling of the sun coming out from behind a cloud. “Coming home with my husband, who decided to prove his devotion by demonstrating that he would literally walk through fire for me? I should think so.”

Crowley made an involuntary face. “Nnngh. Well. That. Nah, I meant earlier. Earth, instead of Heaven. I mean, I’ve been in office blocks that were more interesting.”

That earned him a laugh. “Dearest, you’ve _made _office blocks that were more interesting than the sum total of ideas that have originated up there. Leaving Head Office’s major work aside, of course. Nothing can really top that, I’m afraid.”

Crowley raised an eyebrow eloquently. “And now I see why you want me. Keeping me around for my prowess with floorplans, is it?”

Aziraphale’s tone turned prim. “As long as you’re not marrying me solely for a peek at the collection Up There. I saw you taking a good long look, you know. Tell me, did you see anything particularly familiar?”

He had not, in fact*. “I literally designed a building that invokes an angel,” Crowley muttered. “If anything should appeal to those feathery bastards, you’d think that would be it.”

*Not, of course, that he’d been looking.

Aziraphale was watching him fondly, the remnants of panic finally almost gone from his eyes. “I believe I told you that Heaven has no taste, my dear.”

_And I know why you never liked half my buildings_, Crowley thought but didn’t say. He could see it now—how the open, expansive lobbies would seem like the stark emptiness of Heaven, how the massive Brutalist structures would feel like the weight of authority coming down again, how the sleek minimalist interiors would remind him of a realm in which he’d never been appreciated. The cluttered warmth of the bookshop took on a new shine, in his eyes. Although even this new sentimentality could not excuse the green silk, he assured himself. It was still fair game.

And, even after all of this, it was still there to be wrangled over. “We’re well shot of them, then.” He was definitely strong enough to walk on his own now, but he didn’t give up the supporting arm, letting himself lean for a moment on his husband’s strength. “Come on, then. Let’s get home.”

**

_20 months later_

_Tadfield, Oxfordshire_

“And what precisely,” Aziraphale asked waspishly, “Is ‘chromotherapy’ supposed to be?”

Crowley glanced up from where he was unpacking both suitcases*, taking a moment to enjoy the scene. The room was getting dim in the grey afternoon, and the armchair was positioned just perfectly for Aziraphale’s face to catch the warm orange light from the overlarge salt lamp, making him glow in turn. He was using this moment of unexpected aesthetic advantage to look disapprovingly at the itinerary for the next few days.

*Aziraphale, left to his own devices, would have attempted to live out of his suitcase for the next few days, spending the entire time poking through an ungodly heap of tangled clothes** and complaining bitterly about it all the while, never even registering the empty drawers of the dresser nearby.

**Given that he only ever wore about three outfits, it was an eternal mystery how the angel generated such quantities of luggage.

“It’s a, light thing,” Crowley said, only a little bit distracted. Salt lamps were _not_going to start doing it for him, they really weren’t, because if they were he’d have to buy one for their place and that would open him up to all kinds of commentary that he really didn’t need to deal with. No matter how the light caught in Aziraphale’s curls. “Colors. Different ones, I think, in lights. That sort of thing.”

That earned him a distracted frown. “And what exactly is that supposed to accomplish?”

Crowley shrugged, turning back to the stack of shirts he was re-folding. “I didn’t come up with it, angel. All I did was find a corner and stick in some cubicles with plenty of outlets for the lamps. What they do with them isn’t really on me.”

“Still working on facing the consequences of our actions, are we.” Aziraphale set the brochure down in his lap with a sigh. “But really, my dear, what _are_we supposed to do stuck here for the next three days?”

Crowley considered explaining again that when a lowly architect was invited, along with the rest of his team, to join the annual executive retreat as a reward, _no_was not precisely a viable answer. Particularly when it was held at one of the firm’s most successful recent projects. No matter how inconvenient some of the details. The argument was so well-trod as to be boring, though. “Partner yoga with—” He tried to remember the conversation he’d overheard earlier. “Budgies, I think.”

The expression on Aziraphale’s face was all he could have hoped for. “Why on earth would I want to do yoga with a _bird_?”

Crowley shrugged. “There’s a kombucha social on the deck instead, if you like that better.”

That earned him a look of distinct distaste. “Now really, my dear, must you?”

“If you don’t stop complaining, I’ll toss you into one of the mud baths.”

Aziraphale lit up. “Ooooh, really? They have mud baths?”

Crowley laughed, surprised. “Really?”

Aziraphale gave wriggled in his chair, discontent apparently forgotten. “It’s been simply ages since I’ve been to one, but I remember them being rather lovely. Although they can’t really have the proper mud here, it’s very rare.”

When Aziraphale said ‘simply ages’, it meant anything from a couple of centuries to a few millennia. Either way, there was no need for him to wait any longer. “Then into the mud bath you shall go. And then there’s, I see—” He squinted at the page, still sitting on Aziraphale’s lap. “Detoxifying cocktails happy hour.”

That earned a moment of perplexed silence as they both contemplated the idea. “Sounds very. . . _healthy_,” Aziraphale said eventually.

Crowley shrugged. “’s got alcohol, at least. It’ll be fun. Give you a chance to swap gossip with Celery and ignore Lionel.”

Aziraphale perked up at that, ineffectively hiding his self-satisfied expression. He had been taking advantage of being attached to Crowley’s ever-rising star—it had been increasing with every new project, but had become ascendant with the Institute award—primarily by relishing the increased opportunities it gave him to snub Crowley’s nominal manager. By now Lionel seemed to have become aware that he was, indeed, being slighted, and was increasingly frustrated by his inability to actually _do _anything about it, especially with Crowley safely out of reach in another hemisphere. Aziraphale, who was thoroughly enjoying himself, was showing no sign of letting his grudge lapse. Crowley was finding work events to be far more entertaining than they had been for some time.

“Well worth flying halfway around the world for,” he said dryly, as if he weren’t, in fact, going to relish every moment.

“You thought it was worth flying home to stop at the shop for an hour, angel.” Aziraphale had spent several months agonizing over which of his volumes to bring to Japan with them, and had been second-guessing some of his choices since they’d arrived. Crowley had suggested that, since he’d apparently given up any prohibitions on miracles and was using them freely, this shouldn’t pose too much of a problem, only to be met with a horrified look and an improvised lecture about the proper care of valuable books, which apparently did not include materializing them halfway around the world. Crowley had kept his mouth shut after that, and made sure to schedule a day at their flat while they were back in country.

Aziraphale sighed, but couldn’t quite manage to hide a smile. “I suppose spending time in any of your buildings should be considered a privilege, at any rate.”

The shirts and trousers finally sorted, Crowley unfolded and straightened, stretching. He caught Aziraphale following the movement and smirked, enjoying the resulting blush. “If that’s the goal, I suppose we don’t really need to go anywhere much at all. . .”

Aziraphale smiled brightly, and for a moment Crowley was afraid that the angel was going to call his bluff. No matter how brightly he was shining at the moment, he couldn’t really afford to come this far and then disappear for the entire three days. “I believe I was promised a mud bath,” he said instead. “And then drinks, and then dinner. Which I expect will be either excellent or terrible.”

“My money’s on terrible,” Crowley interjected. “With a side of vegetable smoothies.”

“In which case you may order us some take-out and smuggle it in,” Aziraphale said imperturbably.

“And then?”

“And _then_,” Aziraphale said, smile deepening into a look that had Crowley seriously reconsidering his commitment to networking at any point that evening, “I don’t see any reason why we need to go anywhere much at all.”

Crowley groaned, levering himself to his feet and holding out a hand to help Aziraphale do the same. “You drive a hard bargain.”

“Someone has to keep this household from falling into total moral decay,” he said, tone prim but eyes dancing.

“Nah, see, that’s where your wrong.” Crowley gestured vaguely at the itinerary lying abandoned on the chair. “That’s what the soundbath ceremony is for. Pretty sure.”

Aziraphale shuddered delicately. “Ah. Nevermind. Moral decay shall be the order of the day, then.”

Crowley couldn’t hold back a surprised laugh, reaching for the angel’s hand and moving to hold the door. “Brilliant. Knew you’d see it my way eventually.”

Aziraphale laughed in turn. Halfway through the doorframe he paused, tugging Crowley back towards himself and keeping him there are he brushed a brief and tender kiss across his lips. "It usually turns out to be a pretty good way, my dear." He flashed a shy smile, clasping Crowley's hand in both of his. 

"Oh, you're never living that one down." Crowley finally managed to extricate them from the doorway, tugging gently to get Aziraphale to follow. "Come on, angel." 

Aziraphale smiled and tucked his hand into the fold of Crowley's elbow. "Well, my dear," he said. "Lead on."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And it's done! I seriously never expected that I'd go from a few ancient one-shots and unfinshed WIPs to a series that topped 100k, but here we are. Thanks so much to everyone's who's read it, especially those who have left kudos or comments. I'm so grateful to all of you! I hope you've enjoyed reading this as much as I've loved writing it.


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